By Is your social media game better than your competitors?
You probably don’t know the answer to that if you clicked on this post.
You may not even know how to know.
With over 4 billion people worldwide using social media, competition for customers is high, and you need to know where you sit against the competition.
As a marketing agency, you’ll need some data to back up your social media efforts to your clients. It’s up to you to decide which metrics are the right fit to prove your clients’ growth over time. Being successful in your social media strategies will result in increased leads, sales, and ROI. If you need help to scale your business, check out our white-label social media services.
When you ask your clients what their goals are for 2019, what answer do they give you?
Most will answer with:
- “I want to create buzz around my brand!”
- “I want to increase sales!”
- “I want to achieve a higher ROI!”
…or various other ambitious goals.
Knowing the best Social Media kpi (Key Performance Indicators) will put you on the right track to fulfillment for your clients (not to mention preventing your agency’s scariest monster, churn!) Social media marketing KPIs will be your shining star in staying competitive and proving your efforts.
Read on to learn about the essential social media metrics to keep an eye on!
3 Social Media Reach KPIs
1. Reach
Reach is described as the number of people that saw your piece of content. Some marketers will tell you that reach is only a vanity metric, but it shouldn’t be totally overlooked.
Reach becomes significant when it’s considered alongside other metrics. When you’re looking at audience alone, it won’t tell you much (hence why most people disregard it all together).
Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, along with many other social channels, will display your audience reach on each post, or you can utilize a brand monitoring tool to save you some time! This will be your best friend in tracking—and hitting—your reach goals.
Say you’ve determined that your reach on your newest social post is 749 people. Okay. Great. Awesome. But how do we use that number as an indicator of performance? When posting content, it’s important to know what times throughout the day have the most active users on that social channels—also known as ‘when are most of my followers sitting around on their iPhones the most’. Once you determine when in the day the largest number of your audience is online, you’ll be able to post accordingly to maximize your reach.
Another way to utilize reach is to analyze it against engagement. For example, you can determine that X number of your audience members decided to engage with your content. It’s one thing for them to see it, but it’s another level of interest if they decide to share it with others.
How to calculate reach:
(Reach / Total number of followers) x 100 = Total Reach
How to calculate your reach/engagement ratio:
(Number of engagements/ Reach) x 100 = Reach Engagement Ratio
2. Impressions
Impressions are the number of times that people have seen your piece of content. Remember, reach is the number of individual people who have seen it, but impressions are how many times it was viewed, meaning the same person could have read your post 5 times, resulting in 5 impressions on the post.
3. Followers
Having followers means you are putting something into the world that is actually interesting— and people want more of it. Ever heard of the idea of a “good ratio” for social media users? Basically having a good ratio means that your number of followers is higher than the number of people that you follow, and people actually seem to care about it. So trust us, if someone is following you, it means they don’t want to miss a bit of content.
Followers are more than a vanity metric. If you’re noticing that you are attracting interested customers, you should be thrilled by seeing that follower count go up. We know it’s a good metric, but how can it show performance? Growth. Follower growth over time will indicate if you are constantly putting out good content—better yet, improving your content.
How to calculate follower growth:
[(Current number of followers - Past number of followers) / past number of followers] x 100 = Follower Growth Rate
5 Social Media Engagement KPIs
Having an engaged audience means that your followers relate to or identify with your content in some way. If you notice that your engagement is next to nothing, that means that your marketing message is unclear to your audience, not engaging, and not relatable.
Engagement can be measured in many forms such as clicks, likes, comments, shares and mentions. In this day and age, metrics like these generally signify popularity, and lots of algorithms agree. For example, Facebook’s algorithm essentially loves what its users love, meaning that if you are getting tons of likes, comments, and shares, Facebook will push your content in front of a larger audience.
4. Clicks
Social media clicks are indicators of the attractiveness of your post. Characteristics like colour, title, and image are going to entice people to click on your post. However, clicks alone aren’t big indicators of performance. High clicks, but low likes? Nope, you don’t want that. That shows that your content’s message didn’t match the expectation of the reader, or they simply didn’t like your content. In a perfect world, your clicks will match your overall engagement.
5. Likes
Likes may be a huge self-esteem booster for instagram models— but what do they mean for your agency? Your social media audience has a herd-like mentality. If they come across a post with tons of likes, they are way more likely to like it themselves because they are subconsciously thinking “Hey lots of other people seem to like this post, I think I'll like it as well.”
As content improves, you’ll appeal to more and more people and grow your likes organically.
6. Shares
Likes are the easy part, but to get even one share your content needs to be super relatable to the consumer. When someone puts the effort into sharing your content, it means they want it to be seen by all their connections, signifying how much the piece resonated with them.
If you have a few minutes to kill, head over to the Wendy's twitter page for a good laugh. Wendy’s does a killer job at achieving an outstanding number of retweets from their fans!
7. Comments and Mentions
Are people talking about your brand?
You want to be noticed. Checking on mentions will tell you if you are having a positive, negative, or neutral effect on your clients’ audience, and that way you can start managing expectations and building a great reputation from their very first interactions that brand.
Is your content sparking conversation?
You want to ignite conversation with the audience. When your content produces questions or comments from your audience, it shows customer interest, which can be considered an increased interest in learning more about your client’s offerings.
Wendy’s strikes again…
8. Average Engagement Rate
These smaller metrics alone are not nearly as important as all of them combined. When you consider all these metrics as one big picture, engagement turns into a highly-valued social media kpi. Your client’s average engagement rate is all engagements relative to their number of followers
How to calculate average engagement:
[(likes + clicks + comments + mentions + shares) / number of followers] / 100
3 Social Media Customer KPIs
Social Media Marketing is about targeting the right audience and acquiring new customers for your clients. Customer behavior will be the biggest determinant of their future ROI, so it’s not something to ignore.
9. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
Your CLV will indicate whether your social strategy execution is successful. Yes, CLV is typically used as a financial metric, but you marketing gurus can utilize it too! CLV essentially estimates how much revenue will be brought in by a customer. Because 80% of revenue comes from 20% of customers, it’s important to be delivering targeted content to the 20% of your client’s customers who are spending the big money.
10. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
CAC is a great tool to determine profitability by comparing the revenue brought in by customers to the cost of acquiring that customer. By measuring CLV against CAC, you can show your clients how they are achieving their ROI—and that’s your ultimate goal. For marketers specifically, compare the CAC from different social media channels to determine the lowest channels to put larger ad spend.
How to calculate CAC:
Cost of Marketing Expenses / Number of customers acquired in that period = CAC
11. Customer Testimonials
Though most of these KPIs come in the form of number or dollar metrics, customer testimonials are a great way to show how you excel in customer service. Lots of customer testimonials will come through tweets, mentions, Facebook recommendations, direct messages, etc., and it’s important to keep a log of them to track your client’s progress and improvements.
3 Social Media Conversion KPIs
12. Conversion Rates
Conversions can have various definitions depending on what you’re measuring. Conversion rates stem from customers clicking on a call-to-action such as a content download, free-sign up form, demo request, etc. Regardless of what they’re clicking, it’s your job to make them want to click it. Different kinds of conversion will mean different things for each company, but conversion as a KPI will show you if your marketing efforts are producing a reaction, and from there you can decide what strategies are the best in attracting quality leads.
13. Click-through Rate (CTR)
CTR compares the number of clicks on a call-to-action against the number of impressions that that link had. This will indicate whether the offer was appealing enough to follow through and convince your audience to convert.
How to calculate click-through rate:
(Number of clicks / Number of impressions) / 100 = CTR
14. Bounce Rates
If your client’s have a company blog or create readable guides and content for your clients, you’re going to want to know about your bounce rate.
Why are people clicking on my post then leaving so fast?!
A question that is often asked by curious marketers. If your bounce rate is on the higher side (anywhere around 65% or higher), it essentially means that your first couple sentences of your content isn’t intriguing enough for your audience to read on, and they are jumping off the page. Try changing up your titles and introduction to match the focus of your content and make it intriguing enough that you would want to read more yourself
If you want to learn about more data metrics like bounce rate, Google Analytics is a great data tool!
Conclusion
Reach. Engagement. Conversions. Customers.
Once you start using those four areas as your base social media kpi, you’ll be able to analyze your current position, and create benchmarks for the future. Now that may seem like a lot to know and keep tabs on, and truthfully, it can be. If you’re wanting to spend more time on growing your agency, but don’t want to sacrifice the time spent on your clients, a white-label marketing solution may be just the thing for you!
Happy tracking!
