Social media marketing is an exciting front for online marketers. It is rapidly maturing into a truly effective form of promotion. However, there are still many opportunities and ways to leverage social media that are still relatively unexplored. As such, it is essential to be able to properly track key performance indicators in social media marketing and determine what is working well and what isn’t.
Followers vs Target: This KPI measures the number of followers on a particular network versus the marketer’s goal. It is a fairly straightforward metric, but useful nonetheless for goal tracking.
Social Interactions: This metric is a measurement of how many interactions are occurring with your audience on various social networks. Often marketers will break this down based on the network and the type of interaction. This metric is useful for gaining insight into how well a campaign is resonating.
Social Traffic: A measurement of the number of visitors who click through social media to visit your website is called social traffic. This is useful for gaining insight into whether your social content is interesting enough for your audience to want to learn more.
Social Conversions: One of the most important KPIs for any social media campaign, this measures the number of goal conversions achieved by a social campaign. The goal is often sales; however, it can also be leads generated or a variety of other desirable actions. This is typically combined with social traffic to find the conversion rate.
Social Demographics: This isn’t a KPI so much as a combination of metrics that shows the demographic breakdown of impressions on a social network. For example, it may reveal that your post was most impactful amongst women age 18-24.
Bounce Rate: This KPI measures the percentage of visitors that leave your website after seeing a particular page. This is often examined in degrees of separation from the landing page. For example, you may learn that 50% of visitors leave after your landing page, 15% after viewing an additional page, and 5% after viewing a third page.
Social networks also offer powerful advertisement options, especially with video marketing. For campaigns revolving around paid ads, there are a few more important KPIs.
Cost Per Impression: Marketers can track the number of views of social ads as well as the number of impressions of boosted Facebook posts. Tracking the cost for each impression offers insight into the effective use of your budget. Cost Per Click: Examining the amount of money that needs to be put into an ad in order to generate one click-through to your website is also very useful. When compared against each other, this will help to illuminate which ads are most impactful.
Cost Per Conversion: This KPI measures how much you are spending on social ads in order to generate a goal conversion. Much like CPC, or CPM, this can be used to compare the effectiveness of various ads. Following the right KPIs can help to make your social media campaigns a success. Before you begin any campaign, determine what goals you hope to accomplish with it. From there, identify the KPIs that will help you to guide and control your activities. While it is good to capture and store as much raw data as you can, focusing your analysis on a few select performance indicators will help you to stay focused and to more easily understand the state of your campaign.