I’d have a lot of money if I got a dollar every time someone told me how important social media is. I’m frustrated with people making strong claims about social media without any evidence to support their claims.
They want to know how to measure their efforts on social media in a way that is quantifiable.
This post will cover which KPIs to track for social media marketing channels including Facebook, Twitter and Google+. In addition to the tips, there are also some tools that can help make your task both easy and effective. This post is for you if you are just starting to get serious about social analytics. Let’s get started!
Twitter currently boasts more than 550 million active users. Users who follow brands on social media are more likely to purchase from those brands than from brands they do not follow. This is true for 67% of the half a billion users on social media.
I’m always surprised by that statistic. Twitter can be a useful tool for driving traffic to your website and generating sales or leads. Hear that sound? That’s the sound of money in the bank.
If you’re unsure of how to set realistic social media goals, a good method to employ is to see how your competitors are doing. The following KPIs will help you stay on track and understand where you stand in comparison to your competitors. I recommend using Rival IQ for any competitor analysis on social media.
Follower Growth
This is a graph of your company’s growth over time. The more people you can reach, the more traffic you can get to your site. It’s as simple as that. Followerwonk is a great tool that lets you track who your followers are, who you are following, and who has unfollowed you.
Engagement
Although it is great to have a lot of followers, it is not something to boast about if those followers do not interact with your brand. This means that your followers are not interested in what you have to say. In my eyes, that’s the biggest failure of all. Below are some ways you can measure how engaging you are on Twitter:
The @Replies feature on Twitter allows users to see how often tweets are sent that begin with a particular company’s handle. This can be a useful metric for gauging customer sentiment or gauging the reach of a particular marketing campaign. If someone only follows the sender or the recipient of an @reply, they will not see the @reply in their timeline.
How often are tweets sent that include your company’s handle inside the tweet, not at the beginning? If someone you follow @mentions another account in a post, you will be able to see that mention, even if you don’t follow the account that was mentioned. I find @mentions more valuable than @replies because they are more visible to other users.
When someone retweets your tweet, it means that they are sharing your tweet with their followers. This not only gives you more exposure, but it also helps to build your credibility. It’s a good idea to brainstorm how you can convert your loyal “favoriters” to loyal “retweeters.” Here are a few tips and tricks that can help promote retweeting:
- Include retweetable words (ex: “please,” “retweet,” “10,” “You”)
- Don’t be afraid to ask people to “please retweet”, it increases the chance of retweeting by 160% !
- Tweet interesting links (56.69% of all retweets contain a link !)
- Limit your tweets to 80-110 characters. This makes it easier for others to retweet your content and leaves room for them to customize.
- Tweet during times when the majority of your followers are online. You can find this out using a tool like Followerwonk .
The tweet engagement rate is the number of retweets and favorites a tweet receives divided by the number of followers, multiplied by 1,000. This exposes your content to a whole new audience and can help you to build relationships with new people When someone retweets your content, they are sharing your original tweet with all of their followers, which exposes your content to a whole new audience. This can help you to build relationships with new people.
Facebook provides their users with a way to view analytics for their brand pages through Facebook Insights. This is a more sophisticated system than what Twitter offers their users.
There are a lot of metrics that Facebook Insights offers, so it can be hard to figure out which ones you should be tracking. I find it most effective to focus my attention on a few key metrics that I have identified as being the most important for my company’s social media goals.
Page Like Growth
The more followers you have, the more people you will be able to reach.
Reach
Reach is the number of people who saw your post. This is an important thing to measure if you are running ad campaigns. You want to be sure that your investment is worth it when you spend money on advertising. I suggest that you find out your reach and then look at HubSpot’s guide to see if it is worth it to spend money on Facebook ads.
Engagement
Facebook’s algorithm, EdgeRank, places an enormous importance on engagement. If you want your company updates to be seen by your followers, they need to be engaging with your content by liking, commenting, and sharing.
Measuring post clicks, likes, comments, and shares will give you an idea of how engaging your fans find you. Of all the engagement metrics, the one that matters most to me is shares. If followers share your content, your reach increases, similar to retweets.
How To Set Measurable Goals for Your Social Media Marketing
Creating social media marketing goals will help make social media work consistently and ensure that you are clear in all the areas mentioned above.
Step #1: Know Your Main Objective
Your social media objective is tied in with your social media goals, but it’s not the same as them.
Your social media marketing should have a clear objective, so that you know what you are trying to achieve.
It comes much before your goals. Knowing your objective is important no matter what kind of business you are running, whether it is B2B, e-commerce, or service-based. to work on a brand new marketing campaign, or to enhance customer service— social media can be a powerful communications and marketing tool for your business Social media can be a powerful communications and marketing tool for your business whether you want to improve your revenue numbers with the help of social media, work on a brand new marketing campaign, or enhance customer service.
If you’re looking to gain more authority and establish your brand as an influencer in your industry, you’ll need to focus on creating content that is both informative and interesting. You’ll also need to make sure that your content is easily shareable so that it can reach a wider audience.
To be successful in driving traffic to your website, you need to have a clear understanding of what you want to achieve and identify the steps that will help you reach your goal.
After you have decided on your main objective, you can use your social media goals to help you achieve it. They’re tangible, measurable, attainable, realistic and timely. Your goals should be specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely. The details that lead to success are small.
The most important thing is that you have to decide your objective no matter what, or else your goal setting will be misplaced. It is important that your social media marketing goals are strong and achievable.
Ultimately, your main business objective must be their foundation.
When you follow a proven framework, it becomes easier to achieve your social media goals. The SMART goal-setting method is one goal-setting technique that is superior to the others. This allows you to create goals that are both worthy and practical.
Goals that follow the SMART framework are…
- Specific: The more clear and defined your goal is, the better.
- Measurable: You should be able to track and measure your goal.
- Achievable: Is your goal really achievable? Or too far fetched?
- Realistic: Your goal needs to be practical and realistic in terms of the resources you have.
- Time Sensitive: Whether long-term or short-term, your goal has to have a clear time frame.
Start by looking at your social media goals from a high-level perspective.
Think about what your business wants to achieve in a year, rather than what you would like to achieve this week.
Your social media goals should align with your company’s mission statement.
Here are a few examples of social media goals that are broad enough:
- Achieve a higher social media ROI
- Boost brand awareness and visibility
- Build and strengthen with prospects/customers
- Increase store walk-ins and in-person sales numbers
Although it may be a good idea to have different goals for each social media platform, it might become too difficult to keep up with over time.
The advice is to have one primary objective at the beginning, then to gradually add more personalized goals as you make progress and expand.
Before you set your social media goals, it’s important to establish your baseline targets. If you don’t do social media marketing effectively, it will be weak and ineffective.
Conducting a social media audit will help you establish targets and make sure that the goals you set are relevant. A social media audit is a review of an organization’s social media presence. This can include an analysis of social media activity, content, and strategy.
According to HubSpot:
A social media audit is a regular examination of social channels that represent your brand, including both your business’ owned profiles and impostor accounts.
Even if you are putting a lot of effort into your social media marketing, it might not be effective.
Financial returns can be assessed by conducting a social media audit. You can’t improve your company unless you first do a thorough audit and figure out where your problem areas are. There’s no use trying to fix something that isn’t broken. You’re better off devoting your time to improving things that actually need improvement. You will have a better understanding of your social media marketing campaign and what you can do to improve it.
Here are some steps you can take to make sure your social media audit is effective:
- List out every single social media network you are currently using. Are you on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn or Pinterest?
- Update any information that needs to be changed on all your social accounts.
- Review all your images to ensure they are relevant and updated.
- Make sure your branding and messaging are consistent across all social media platforms.
- Claim your vanity URLs if you haven’t already.
- Take a deeper look into your subscribers’ or followers’ demographics.
- Analyze your overall posting activity, the hashtags you’re using and see where it’s lacking.
- Check if your engagement rates and follower count are consistent with your efforts.
- Study every successful piece of content that has garnered high number of shares, retweets, likes, etc.
- Track your competitors and conduct a thorough audit.
The OKR system, which stands for “Objectives and Key Results,” can help you add more meaning to your goals.
The main objective we talked about in step one is not the same as OKRs. Individual objectives with a focus on key results are called OKRs.
The first step is about the big picture, while OKRs are about the details.
The need for OKRs is clear in order to achieve success with the big picture by taking care of the smaller details.
When you look at your main objective as one big thing, it seems difficult to achieve.
When every team member has their own specific goals to work on, they will be helping to achieve the company’s main goal. If you update your progress regularly, you and your team will always know what your next steps are.
This clarity is paramount to your success.
When your social media marketing performance is organized in one central place, it becomes very easy to assess. The more you focus on your OKRs and track them, the better your team’s results will be.
Step #5: Measure the Right Metrics
You will be able to achieve your social media goals by measuring the right metrics, as this will give you an indication of what is working well. Or, what factors are hindering it.
There is a common belief that social media platforms are full of idiotic and self-absorbed content that doesn’t hold any value. But that’s not completely true.
You can tell if you are making progress by looking at numbers like comments, likes, shares, and followers. If your audience is connecting to your social media activity, then you’re doing something right. social media metrics can help you understand how your efforts are doing in comparison to your competition.
The state of these metrics will improve if their situation improves. And vice versa. Your content’s effectiveness can be measured by how well it engages your audience. If your social media posts are great, it will definitely resonate with your target audience, which are also your potential customers.
They will express their support by sharing and liking your content, which will help your social media marketing efforts down the line. In order to make your metrics effective, you need to connect them to your main business goals, and also be aware of the latest social media trends. They can either be seen as important metrics or easily dismissed as vanity metrics.
You need to track metrics that can help you understand and demonstrate how social media is improving your business results.
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