Why You Need KPI Monitoring for Social Media

How do you measure the success of your social media campaign?

A surprising 46% of B2B marketers don’t know if their social channels have generated any revenue for their business. If those marketers used KPI monitoring tools and techniques, they’d know how effective their social media was.

Curious about what KPIs you should be monitoring? Read on to learn everything you need to know about successful social media marketing.

KPI Monitoring: What To Pay Attention To

KPI stands for Key Performance Indicator. A KPI could essentially be any metric of data you get in your reports, you just have to think it’s important enough to determine success.

Platforms like Facebook and Twitter have so much information that it can be hard to figure out which data is the most important.

Every social media manager has a different way they like to measure success. There isn’t one KPI that always comes out on top, there is usually a combination of them that can accurately show the success of a campaign.

Curious about what KPIs you should always pay attention to? When you’re KPI monitoring, make sure you take note of these important metrics.

Engagement

Likes and shares aren’t everything when it comes to KPI monitoring, but they’re still important.

Industry professionals from places like the Imagine That marketing agency know that engagement isn’t only just likes and shares.

Don’t view likes and shares as separate social media KPIs. When you’re doing KPI monitoring, any and all interactions on social media should be under the engagement umbrella.

Comments, clicks, brand mentions, profile visits, and active followers all fall under the engagement umbrella.

Audiences that interact with the content you share are clearly finding value in what you post. If people aren’t interacting with your content, it’s time to switch up your strategy.

If you’re not seeing the engagement you’d like on social, change the format of your posts. Keep them short, simple to read, and above all shareable.

Impressions

Impressions are the amount of times your content has shown up in social media feeds. You may show up in someone’s social feed because they already follow you, or because a friend of theirs shared your content.

It’s important to note that an impression doesn’t mean that your content has been engaged with. Someone may have scrolled past your posts and not have noticed it.

Despite that, impressions are an important KPI. Ideally, you want a high number of impressions. You want to cast a wide net and get as many eyes on your content as possible.

If you aren’t showing up in feeds, you need to rethink your strategy. Consider being more active in social with your business profile, or encourage your followers to like and share things.

Website Traffic

Talking about your website when you’re focused on KPI monitoring for social media may seem strange. But if you want to measure the true success of your social media, your website needs to be a part of your plan.

Social media should be used as a billboard for your business. People shouldn’t just enjoy your content, they should be interested in looking at your website so they can learn more about your company or make a purchase.

Google Analytics has made it easy to see how much traffic you’re getting from social media. Simply open analytics, look under “acquisition”, and click on social. From there you should be able to easily see where you’re getting traffic from.

Leads

The website traffic numbers you get should help shed some light on the leads you get from social.

See how many people are coming to your site from social media. From there, you should be able to accurately determine how many people are finding your site on social media.

From there, you just have to do one simple thing to figure out your social media leads: ask the customers.

Whether you have a contact us form on the website or follow up with customers individually, ask them how they found you. See how many people are coming from social media and how many are simply from website searches.

Follower Numbers

How many followers did you gain the past week? Do you know how many you gained in the last month?

If you aren’t tracking the number of followers you have, start today. The number of followers you gain can show you how effective your social media message is.

Organic growth is great, but it’s hard to attain. It’s easier than ever now to create cost-effective and inexpensive paid campaigns on a variety of social platforms to get more followers.

Consider running a likes campaign on Facebook or Twitter. Create compelling copy and pair it with a nice image to attract more followers.

If you’re having trouble figuring out why people aren’t liking your page, look at pages in your industry that do have a healthy follower count. Take note of the type of content they post and the time it goes up.

ROI

Are you pouring money into a social media campaign? You want to make sure that you’re getting the most bang for your buck, that’s why KPI monitoring for ROI is important.

You don’t have to do anything elaborate to figure out ROI. If you’ve been monitoring the other KPIs we’ve mentioned, figuring out the true ROI of a campaign is easy.

See how much money you’ve been spending on your campaigns, then compare that with the amount of new customers you’ve brought in. When you look at the rest of the KPIs you’ve been tracking, you’ll have an accurate picture of campaign performance.

Next Steps

Social media marketing doesn’t have to be a mystery. If you use KPI monitoring to determine factors like reach, impressions, shares, and ROI, social media success becomes much more attainable.

Social media marketing is only a small part of digital marketing. If you want to dive deeper into digital, check out our post on how to improve your site’s rank on Google.