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Which KPIs Should You Be Tracking to Prove Social Media Success?

Friday 23 September 2016

6 minute read

By Sarah Burns

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are useful for measuring the success of your social media efforts, but what you must know is which KPIs provide the crucial information you need.

Most people recognise and understand metrics such as followers, likes, retweets and the alike, but these aren’t necessarily the most insightful results you need to be checking out.

The previously mentioned KPIs are vanity metrics rather than worthwhile facts that will help you improve your social media strategy.

You need to focus on measuring new leads, engagement statistics, reach numbers and conversions – which is the result of the previous three, essentially.

Leads

Those new likes and followers are people hat potentially are eventual-new-customers for your organisation. Take note of who is worthwhile for your brand – this is why ‘fake followers’ are irrelevant and a ‘vanity number’.

Are any leads the kind of person or company that your business require – i.e. business type, demographics etc. – because these are the likes and followers we recognise as ‘leads’.  

To effectively measure lead quality from social media, you can follow this guide (Source: Marketing Cloud), although it is particularly high-level.

On a lower scale, simply remember to quickly check out your newest followers’ profiles and see if they meet your needs – you’ll soon begin to realise how often that occurs, or not.

Engagement

Depending on what platform you’re monitoring, your engagement metrics are different, but it’s crucial that you monitor them.

A worrying issue is a large reach – large number of followers – with a low engagement rate – few likes, comments and shares.

Interestingly a sign of poor engagement with your posts on Facebook comes in the form of lower reach as Facebook Algorithms now measure how effective your posting is at engaging with customers and hides it from the time lines of those that don’t actively engage with your brand. Find out more about Facebook Algorithms and Twitter Algorithms in our respective blog posts (click links).

Popular engagement KPIs include: Clicks, likes, shares, comments, brand mentions and profile visits. A lot of these KPIs are fairly easy to find through most message scheduling platforms. Ask Thrive about this if you need more information!

Reach

As we mentioned in our Engagement section, Reach can be difficult to accurately measure thanks to new algorithm updates, particularly on Facebook, but it is still crucial to an overall review of social media performance. Unlike Engagement KPIs, Reach numbers can be much vaguer in terms of clear answers about your performance, but are still potentially invaluable.

Reach metrics include Followers, Likes, Impressions and Traffic Data, but, again, this can depend on the platform you’re measuring.

Conversions

Which of your social media leads are actually becoming customers? This will always be a low rate in comparison to other methods of converting leads into customers – social media is an awareness tool, not a sales tool. However, it is worthwhile to find out which of your platforms is the most successful and using all of the previous metrics can be a good indicator.

Find out more about using social media as an awareness tool, rather than a sales tool in our blog post.  

To discuss the content of this blog or how we can support your business, get in touch with our team today via email hello@thriveability.co.uk or call 0845 838 7517. 

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