Regardless of whether you’re aiming to be an influencer for a big luxury brand or marketeer for a small field service business, social media is one of your key channels to success. Social media platforms have evolved to such an extent that it can be challenging for newcomers to understand how to utilize them to their advantage and gain traction and engagement. Because of that, you need to meticulously plan your every move to ensure you’re not wasting time and can measure the value of your efforts accordingly.
To guarantee a social media success story, you may want to focus on meeting key performance indicators (KPIs) and using these to create your social media marketing plan. Depending on who you ask, the number of KPIs you may want to monitor can be as many as 19 or as low as three. In this article, we’ll look at the seven most basic KPIs, where most other social performance stats are derived from.
1. Follower count
Follower count is the easiest KPI to understand, yet it’s also greatly misunderstood. Primarily, your social media efforts shouldn’t focus on only growing follower count. The number of people following your accounts is meaningless if none of your followers engage with the content you promote. A successful social campaign can therefore be achieved even if you have a small number of followers in your account if they are highly engaged.
However, it doesn’t mean that getting people to follow you is entirely unimportant. Remember that in the past few years, most platforms have made changes to ensure that followers or subscribers of social media pages and accounts are notified whenever the ones they follow release new content.
To take advantage of this and consider investing in a business management application like Jobber which enables you to integrate your social media campaigns into one platform. Jobber has been specifically developed to support businesses within the field service sector e.g., cleaning companies that dispatch technicians to a site to complete a job. This software has been fully integrated with MailChimp which means that as well as managing all day-to-day operations, it is capable of designing and publishing ads on social media, and utilizing functions such as automated contact sync to execute ready-to-run email campaigns.
2. Audience growth rate
While you don’t need to always look at the total number of followers you have, you need to monitor its growth rate. Mainly, you must ensure that your account, page, or channel is gaining new followers and not losing them.
Monitoring your audience growth rate is an excellent way to measure your social media performance. It’s worth understanding that an increase of followers is good, stagnation is okay, but a decrease of followers is not acceptable.
Most people don’t bother with accounts they don’t care about. They tend not to waste time unfollowing a business page or account unless said business or account has done something negative to influence them to unfollow.
Knowing that 78% of consumers are willing to do repeat business with a company if they receive a positive experience from its social media channels, means you want to avoid unfollowing or unsubscribes at all costs. (2)
3. Impression and reach
The number of impressions is the count of views your post or content received or generated. Note that it also counts repeat views from the same user. Reach on the other hand indicates how many people have seen your content since it went live on your social media account. Unlike impressions, reach only counts the number of unique viewers. For example, you may have 1,000 impressions on one of your posts but only have 100 in your reach count.
Consider when the best time is to post on your social channels. It might be at lunchtime when people are scrolling on their phones during a break, or later in the evening when people are relaxing at home. You can determine if your content is capturing the interest of the modern consumer and being executed in the best possible way by measuring if your activity is leading to conversions.
4. Likes, comments, and shares
Once social media marketers have a decent follower count, growth rate, and reach, they often focus on the engagement metrics. These metrics involve the KPI trifecta—number of likes, comments, and shares.
While not all social media platforms refer to ‘likes’ as likes, it’s now the standard term used by social media marketers. Liking is the fastest and easiest way followers can interact with an influencer or business’ content. And it’s a better indicator that your content has been seen or consumed by people than impression and reach alone.
Further to this, commenting is an even better form of engagement. It’s genuinely an excellent standard in gauging that people have read or consumed your content. Contrary to this, however, is the acknowledgment that not all comments are good.
Shares are ultimately the most helpful and sought-after type of user engagement. They usually provide you with a positive signal to your social channels that what you are posting is highly relevant to your audience. It can also indicate if your activity is going some way to improving your brand image and helping to raise some of your other KPIs. Of course, just like with likes, sharing may be worded a bit differently from platform to platform.
If you are running a campaign that is not getting any likes, comments, or shares, you can be pretty sure your campaign efforts are not working. Review the content you are posting and conduct some research to identify how it is being received. 68% of people will only share content they find that gives a good sense of who they are. (3)
Conclusion
The KPIs mentioned here are just a few that can be used to measure the effectiveness of your social media campaign. Consider what others will be effective for your specific campaign. Take your learnings to adapt your efforts and fine-tune the content you produce as you get to know your users. You will be rewarded with high engagement and conversions as you begin to get it right.
References
- “19 Social Media KPIs You Should Be Tracking”, Source: https://blog.hootsuite.com/social-media-kpis-key-performance-indicators/
- “7 Statistics That Prove The Importance Of Social Media Marketing In Business”, Source: https://sproutsocial.com/insights/importance-of-social-media-marketing-in-business/
- “The Psychology Of Social Media: Why We Like, Comment, And Share Online”, Source: https://buffer.com/resources/psychology-of-social-media/
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