In addition to web analytic metrics the right set of KPIs should also be carefully chosen for social media. Intuitively, the number of fans, followers, and like counts are obvious measures of social media success. However, it is important to identify and track the right social media KPIs beyond these crude measures. Social media metrics should help a brand determine the performance of a social media campaign and the return on investment from it. They need to be focused on generating new traffic to your site, increasing lead generation, and expanding your brand. Depending on the capacity and the sophistication of your analytics tools, you can measure dozens of different metrics on social media. However, there are only a few fundamental questions to guide your analysis. First, are you reaching qualified people? Second, are you engaging with these qualified people? And third, how many of your social media fans are inquiring about your products or services? And fourth, how many of them actually become your customers? More specifically, there are 4 main areas of social media KPIs they should be focusing on: engagement, reach, leads, and conversions. Let's first look at social media engagement. Engagement is by far the most important indicator you should be concerned with on social media. It is the catalyst for improvement in all of the other social media KPIs. Simply put, engagement measures the number of likes, shares, and comments that your social media updates receive. Having a large reach with low engagement is a bad sign, because it shows that you don't have a marketing message or content that resonates. Reaching millions of people means nothing if they are not interested in what you offer. If your audience is engaged, no matter how small it is, can grow organically and generate more leads. Different social media platforms may have different types of engagements. For example: On Facebook. users have a number of ways, such as liking, sharing, and commenting, to engage with a message. But on Twitter, following and retweeting or the most important measures. On Snapchat, the content is short-lived so the window to measure engagement is much narrower than sites like YouTube, and the videos on YouTube generally can be much longer than those on Facebook and Snapchat, as such, engagement on YouTube should also consider revisits and long-duration attention. The specific metrics you can use to measure engagement will vary by social media platforms. But typically include the following: clicks, likes, shares, comments, brand mentions, sentiment, active followers, and profile visits. These metrics should not be used in isolation. While your raving fans will click on everything you share, new customers may only click on posts that interest them. A combination of many clicks with very few likes and shares shows that your post got the attention but didn't deliver the exceptional quality needed for the viewers to engage. Great overall engagement with a small number of clicks indicates that you need to work on how you pitch your content by testing different titles or visuals, tags, or mentions can show that people are having a conversation about your brand. But you must consider the sentiment of these mentions, you don't want your brand to be mentioned often in a negative light. You should also consider these measures in the right cultural and social contexts. For example, 20,000 likes on a Facebook post is considered a pretty successful campaign but 20,000 likes on WeChat, which is a social app used by over a billion users in China, has very little impact simply because of the sheer number of active users on that platform and the density or connectedness of the Chinese community on that platform. It is also a cultural norm for Chinese users to like and comment on each other's posts. Just as a measure of good etiquette. As I mentioned previously, reach is an old-school marketing metric that remains important in the digital context. Measuring reach on social media can be misleading at times, as it only shows how many people potentially saw your post or that it was made available. Unlike engagement, which has definitive answers, such as X amount of likes, reach is really just an estimate. You can measure reach by tracking the number of followers or fans, the total number of impressions, and the referral traffic to your website from your own social media pages. What percentage of the traffic to your website is coming from social media? If you're investing a good amount of time and effort into your social media content you will want to make sure that this number reflects that. Once your social media accounts start gaining traction it is easy to get caught up in how many likes and shares you're getting. It feels good to see people enjoying your content, but what about the bottom line? To ensure you're getting the best return on investment from your social media, you have to ask tough questions. For example, how many of these engaged fans are actually interested in making a purchase from my company? You may also have an enormous following on Instagram because people love your photos, but how does that translate to new sales? You can't answer that question if you are not measuring lead generation from social media and if you are not generating leads you're either on the wrong platform or your content isn't engaging with your buyer's persona. Finally, you should track the number of acquired customers from your social media presence. Most of your social media posts should be focused on providing content for your audience and having a conversation with them. But when the time comes for you to ask for something in return, you want to know how many of those fans actually end up making it to the finish line. Many consider this the ultimate measurement of your success in social media marketing. If you've truly found the right people and kept them engaged they will answer your call to action. You shouldn't expect to have high new customer rates from social media because a lot of your followers will be current customers and a significant portion are only interested in the content. That's just the way it goes. However, you want to pay attention to which social media channels produced the highest and the lowest numbers. This shows you where to focus more time and where your best leads are coming from. A final note about measuring the success of social media marketing, engagement and reach are fun to measure because they make your brand look good, but you have to track the KPIs to paint the full picture. The goal of measuring social media KPIs isn't to justify your marketing campaign. It is to improve it. Remember, while these are all smart choices you should only focus on social media KPIs that are most relevant to the platforms your brand is active on and that has the most relevance to your audience behavior. Every audience is different. If your ideal buyer isn't inclined to hitting like but is still generating sales, don't beat yourself up about it. Track what makes sense and actually reflects your success.
