With social media KPIs, or key performance indicators, you can measure the effectiveness of your social media marketing efforts against different time periods and for various demographics you're targeting.
Through the best KPIs for social media, your brand can determine the initiatives that drive the most engagement and conversions. Let's take a deeper look into this subject.
Table of Contents
What Are Social Media KPIs?
Social media KPIs help you monitor the growth of your social presence. They are customizable documents or templates for evaluation to determine if you are achieving your campaign objectives. Understanding social media metrics enables you to determine your initiatives’ effectiveness, impact, and reach.
KPIs for social media form a vital part of your social media marketing strategies. All social activities should be measured against them to assess the target audience’s reaction and reception. These will give you a clearer direction of where you need to take your social programs to reach your business goals.
Best KPIs for Social Media
The top key metrics for social media help businesses gauge the effectiveness of their social media strategies, identify areas for improvement, and make data-driven decisions. Here are the best KPIs for social media you should regularly keep an eye on.
- Number of Followers or Fans
- Impressions and Reach
- Your Share of Voice (SOV)
- Likes and Reactions
- Shares
- Comments and Replies
- Lead Generation
1. Number of Followers or Fans
This indicates the number of people who follow your social media accounts. These followers or fans choose to receive updates from your page on their feed, showing interest in your offers. It keeps them in the loop of any new information from your company.
While this is a vanity metric without much weight when monitored alone, it is a great start to derive more actionable insights for your next social activities.
When you have a good number of followers, you can influence them to take action, leave comments under your posts and share your updates.
Pro tip: Gauging your shares and impressions against your total number of fans will inform you how many actively engage with your page.
2. Impressions and Reach
On the one hand, reach refers to the number of users who view your social media content. On the other, impressions are the number of times they have seen your posts. This means that the reach is the unique impressions that your page or a single post receives.
Pro tip: If your content receives low unique impressions, this may signify that you should modify your content strategies. Rethink how you deliver your strategies and determine if they are impactful, appealing, and valuable enough.
3. Your Share of Voice (SOV)
SOV assesses your brand exposure versus the competitors. This indicates the number of conversations happening around your brand and offers on social networks. It gives you an idea about your brand positioning in your niche.
In addition, it weighs your online visibility based on conversions redirected from mentions and tags.
Pro tip: Here is how you calculate your share of voice through tags and mentions:
- Set the duration you want to compute for SOV.
- Divide the mentions within this timeframe by your total tags and mentions.
- Get the percentage and multiply it by 100.
- Compare this figure with your competitors’.
4. Likes and Reactions
Likes and reactions are social media KPIs for engagement. A powerful social post gets more reactions or likes from followers. A significant number of likes means that your content is compelling enough to convince visitors to engage and hit the like button.
Pro tip: Note the specific reactions your posts get. This will tell you about how people feel about your content and overall social presence.
5. Shares
A post’s number of shares indicates how many people resonate with your content, which is why they share and refer it to others.
Shares can be posting your content to a user’s personal feed and page or sending them via message to friends and family.
Pro tip: Your shares suggest if you are consistently on track with your content. These can tell you where to draw more ideas and inspiration from.
6. Comments and Replies
More comments and replies mean your target audience connects with the content. These help you reach and engage with more online communities and potential leads.
However, more than the number of comments and replies under your content, their nature also offers insight into your posts. That is why you should keep an eye out for negative or critical comments that may affect your enterprise’s reputation.
Pro tip: Put in the time to acknowledge user comments. If they involve complaints, ensure you handle the situation graciously and assure the client that you will resolve any concerns. This will show that you value your followers or customers.
7. Lead Generation
Your social media leads are prospective customers who are interested in your product or services but are yet to convert. Invest time to monitor these leads driven from your social media activities.
Conversions can be any of the following:
- Completing a purchase
- Booking your services
- Subscribing to your emails and newsletters or blog post updates
- Visiting your landing page and looking around your website
Pro tip: Include a product page, landing page, and website links that redirect social media visitors to your web pages. This will depend on your defined campaign goals, which can be any of these:
- Get more signups
- Inform
- Sell
How To Set Social Media KPIs?
When establishing social media KPIs, ensuring they align with the company's overall business objectives is essential. However, it's not a one-time activity, even when the KPIs are SMART.
Setting specific KPIs for each social media campaign and platform can result in more detailed and data-driven reports for all social media activities. It is also crucial to think SMARTER, which means leaving room for evaluation and re-evaluation of the KPIs.
As business goals evolve, social media KPIs should also be adaptable to changing circumstances. Therefore, to establish and track effective social media KPIs, the following steps would be necessary:
- Clearly state the objective of the KPI and how tracking it will support the company's business goals.
- Name the KPI and make it specific by adding a value and timeline.
- Communicate the KPI with relevant stakeholders to align expectations.
- Collect benchmark data to analyze current performance and compare changes over time.
- Understand industry benchmarks to set realistic goals.
- Define the cadence of tracking KPIs to react quickly to developments.
- Regularly review and adjust KPIs to ensure their relevance to the company's changing business needs.
How To Track Social Media Metrics?
After becoming aware of the crucial social media KPIs to monitor, what methods will you use to track them and communicate your accomplishments?
You can adopt several approaches, such as the following:
1. Native Solutions
One alternative is to track social media KPIs through the native analytics features each social media platform provides. This option is cost-effective, user-friendly, and suitable for social media managers who only monitor a few social accounts. Instagram Insights, Facebook Insights, Twitter Analytics, LinkedIn Analytics, and YouTube Analytics are some popular solutions offered by major social media platforms for tracking social media performance.
However, this approach may not best fit teams managing multiple accounts across various social networks. The reason is that tracking metrics from different sources entails switching between multiple dashboards, making it more complicated to gather, compare, and evaluate outcomes.
2. Custom Reports
Generating custom reports entails consolidating social media KPIs into a single, easily understandable document for your team and superiors. The process involves manually entering the data gathered from various social channels into a single document, which should be presented in a visually appealing and concise manner.
To demonstrate how your work contributes to the brand's business objectives and impacts its bottom line, incorporate graphs, charts, and examples in your report.
3. Social Media Management Platform
When handling multiple accounts on various social media platforms as part of your brand's strategy, utilizing a social media management platform can simplify KPI tracking. These platforms streamline collecting, analyzing, and disseminating data, making it both efficient and effective.
Key Takeaways on Social Media KPIs
Create lucrative social media campaigns by making the time and exerting effort to measure your ROI against the best KPIs for social media — or let professional social media marketing companies do it for you!
You can get essential insights into the aspects of your channel requiring more attention through KPIs for social media engagement.
Social Media KPIs FAQs
1. What tools can I use to track social media KPIs?
The following are some of the popular tools for tracking social media KPIs and metrics:
- Facebook Pixels.
- Google Analytics Pixel.
- Instagram Insights.
- Traackr.
- Hootsuite Impact.
- Sprout Social.
- HubSpot.
- BuzzSumo.
2. How do you calculate KPI for social media?
There are quite a few formulas for calculating the SM KPI. The following are some examples:
- Post Reach Percentage = Post Views / Total followers × 100.
- Growth rate percentage = New followers / Total followers × 100.
- SSoV Percentage = Your Mentions / Total Mentions × 100.
- Average Engagement Rate Percentage = Likes + Comments + Shares / Followers × 100.
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