4 Key Social Media KPIs You Need to Focus On

We all love a bit of social media, it’s probably the first thing we check in the morning and the last thing we check before going to bed. Social media is great for socialising and from a business prospective it is also a great tool for building solid relationships with your customers as well as your ultimate goal: increased revenue and ROI (return on investment).
Having thousands of followers and a great deal of ‘likes’ is good but it’s not the be all and end all, there are so many other social media KPIs (key performance indicators) that you can monitor that will give you a better overall picture.
When measuring your social media KPIs there are 4 questions that you should be asking yourself:

Are you reaching your target demographic?
Are you engaging with your audience?
Are any of your followers inquiring about your product or service?
How many of them have been converted to real customers?

These questions lead us to the four main KPIs that our social media experts at Social Warehouse believe you should be focusing on to be running an effective social media campaign that provides results:

Reach Focus

Is your message getting out there?
When we talk about reach, we are referring to how far it is your message actually travelling? how many people are getting to see your message?
Whatever type of business you have ultimately you have a message that you want to get heard and it is probably one of the most important areas of social media. If people don’t see your message then how can you convert them to customers and increase revenue?
It can be a difficult task and sometimes misleading trying to work out reach through social media channels, however there are a few things that you can monitor which can help give you an idea of how many people you are reaching.
Take these points with a pinch of salt and use it as a guide, the main point is you want to see high numbers as opposed to low numbers

1. Number of Followers

In terms of reach the higher the number of followers you have the better it is for you, as this indicates the number of people you can reach without any actual engagement.
However it is important to know that this is a guide and means ‘potential’ reach. You may have 1o,ooo followers but it means that 10,000 people could see your post not necessarily all of them will. The higher your follower count the more likely more people will see your message, just try not give yourself high ambitions with falsely inflated follower counts.
2. Impressions (Twitter)

Twitter gives you an option to see how many impressions you received which is a great tool that highlights how many times your post showed up in someones news feed or timeline.
This is a bonus on top of potential reach from followers, as it means that your post has reached a wider audience other than your actual followers as it has either been shared or liked by one of your current followers.
Reaching a wider audience means your post is spreading and is an opportunity to increase followers and eventually convert them to customers.
Again, as with your followers this doesn’t necessarily mean that the total figure you have for impressions is who actually saw it, but it is a good guide and indication to how many people you are reaching.
3. Website Traffic
Website traffic is a very important factor that should be monitored on a regular basis by all social media managers. Many people tend to miss this and it is something that is very beneficial to you and your business.
Think about the time and energy you spend on creating the perfect social media campaign – now think about what that is worth. If you are not getting traffic through social media it’s probably time to rethink how you manage your social media channels.
There are many tools out there that you can use to help identify the percentage of web traffic through social media. Our social media experts favourite tool to use is Google Analytics – it is a great tool that can be used for multiple engagements, tracking web traffic through social media being one of them. Don’t worry if you are not sure how to use it as Google offer free online courses to learn how to utilise Google Analytics for your benefit.
Engagement Focus

This is a big KPI that you should always concentrate on and look to improve regularly on social media. Your engagement reach is really what gets the ball rolling, it combines the amount of likes, shares and comments that you receive through your social media channels. The more likes you get the more likely people are to share that same content, the aim here is to make your content go viral.
It is great having a large following base as this means you have a large reach, however, there is no point if your engagement with that reach is low. This metric shows that the message you are portraying is not effective and people are not interested.
No matter how large or small your reach is, if your audience is interested and engaged it is far more effective and ultimately will lead to a larger audience and generate leads organically.
Higher interactions means more visibility for you and in turn shows the quality of what you are posting.
Each social media platform has their own KPIs that you can monitor but in general they will have the following:
1.Clicks
This refers to how many times people click on your post – the quality of your posts is a really high determining factor.
You need to remember that most people will see a post and skim past it, so you want to stand out from the crowd. This means that the title of your post needs to be captivating and the image needs to be interesting for people to want to even consider clicking on it. The more enticing your post the more likely people are to click on it, which means you’ve got through the first step.
However it’s not all about getting a thousand clicks, the next step is to get people liking and sharing that content. Having a large number of clicks and no follow through engagement means that the end product did not live up to expectation. If this is the case it means that the delivery was great but you need to work on your selling point to increase viewer engagement.
2. Likes
Do people like what you are pitching? if not, why not?
Likes lead to popularity, we all know that if we see a post with loads of likes we are almost immediately tempted to click on it to see what all the fuss is about.
Chances are if loads of other people like it you are most likely to like it too. Not only does a high like count mean that people appreciate your posts, it also means that you are likely to move up in ranking as most search algorithms use reach engagement as a determining factor as it is considered that your post is of high quality due to follower endorsements through the like button.
3. Shares
This is very similar to ‘likes’, the chances are if you get a high number of likes people are going to want to share that content which is of course what you want.
Having a high number of ‘likes’ but no sharing means your post was good, but not good enough to share it. Liking a post is very easy and simple it’s done at the click of a button, but sharing a post takes a little bit more work people consciously think about it before doing it.
Proof is in the pudding if you can get people to ‘like’ and share your post, it is a good sign that you are doing the right thing and proves the quality of your work.
4. Comments
The next step is to get people talking about your post, whether it be good comments or critical comments.
Any type of discussion about your post is a great marketing aspect, and means you can contribute and convert customers. Everyone likes a good old discussion about something they are interested in and if you can generate that through your posts it is a reliable sign that your content is reaching the required engagement reach.
5. Brand Mentions

This is a hard one to do but is not unattainable. Getting people to talk about you when you are not involved in the conversation is not only a huge sign that they like and appreciate you, but also a free way of getting marketing.
If a product or service lives up to expectation then people will want to share and speak about it. The bottom line is, if you can get through points 1-4 above there should be no problem getting people to mention you in their posts organically and is probably the social media PR holy grail..
6. Active Followers

This is the difference between someone who last logged on to social media a year ago and someone who has logged on in the past 30 days.
It’s great to have a high following count but if only 50% of them are active your engagement rate dramatically drops. There are various tools available to help you identify inactive followers and any fake accounts for every social media platform.
Lead Focus

Following on from engagement focus you should be getting lead generations. After all its not only ‘likes’ and shares that you want form your posts, ultimately you want to see an improved ROI otherwise what’s the point?
Having engaged followers is great but how many of these have you converted into real customers? How many of them have made a purchase from your company? These are questions that you should regularly visit to ensure that your social media is working as desired.
Most businesses have more than one social media platform which is a great start, but after trial and error you need to work out which ones are most suited to your business and which ones are generating leads. The ones that are generating the most leads are the ones that you need to focus your time on.
As with web traffic Google Analytics will help you identify which leads are being generated through social media, therefore verifying what percentage of sales are attributed to social media.
If however you find that you are not generating any leads its time to think about changing your social media strategy to benefit you.
Customer Focus

Ultimately it is your customers that you are interested in, without them you have no engagement, no leads and no sales, which means there is no ROI and no increased revenue. The idea is to provide your customers with the right content that they are interested in with an element of socialising with them. If you can perfect this then it will lead to sales and the rest is history.
Having a high following count is great, but trying to keep them is another story and this is what you ultimately want to do. You will find that most of your followers are current customers and if they are truly engaged you will get repeat custom.
Tracking customer acquisition from social media is necessary if you want to successfully measure ROI. After all you want to keep your existing customers happy without them what do you have?

Running a successful social media campaign can be tricky and at sometimes difficult, there are a lot of KPIs that should be monitored including the above four mentioned but not limited to just these. The key is to monitor these separately as to not get overwhelmed and take each step as it comes.
Sometimes you may not have time or generally find it difficult to keep up in maintaining your social media channels, if this is the case then we strongly recommend that you hire a social media manager to take the stress away. If you would like help managing your social media channels then get in touch today and one of social media experts would be happy to talk you.