​As a social media marketer, I am often asked, “but how are you going to measure this?” And then that turns into a conversation about ROI, or return on investment (tracking conversions - a completely separate discussion). When this happens, I turn to KPIs, or key performance indicators. Using KPIs, I’m not only able to track a campaign’s success but also see where, perhaps, (but unlikely 😉 ) I may have missed the mark. Here are a handful of key social media KPIs to track.

1) Social Media Presence

Your presence on social media is determined by many things and you should be asking yourself things like:

“How predominately does my brand or company appear on social media?”

“Are people talking about my products and services?”

These questions can be answered by taking look at the following:

Followers and Fans

Easily measurable and trackable over time, these are the people that are subscribing to your feed. Facebookers are fans and Tweeters and Instagrammers are followers. Obviously, you want to see growth over time. I recommend assessing your growth every 90 days. 

Number of Mentions

This is how you’re going to be able to tell whether or not people are talking about your brand/company or your products/services. These mentions will give you a good understanding of the type of conversation surrounding your company.

On a related note, link building should be a vital part of your SEO strategy. You want others to link to your website and/or blog as it builds your domain authority and makes you more reputable within your industry. Keeping track of the number of inbound links you’re generating will help you monitor the quality of content you’re pushing out.

Reach

Reach is typically defined as the potential size of an audience any given message could reach. The takeaway here is the potential; it does not mean your message is being seen by your entire audience but it has the potential to do so and that potential is calculated by using things like number of followers and shares and impressions. Reach should not be confused with impressions (how many times it’s displayed) or engagement (interaction).

2) Social Media Engagement

This is where quality is going to trump quantity. Sure high numbers look great, but how your audience is engaging with your brand or company is going to serve you better in terms of measuring the success of your social media campaign. Look at these particular KPIs to track your social media engagement. 

Retweets

When other people forward, or retweet, your message it obviously means they thought it was valuable content and worthy of being shared. This is good. Why? Because when those tweets get retweeted, it only expands the reach of that message to a larger audience, outside of your network, who would have otherwise not have seen that message; those people might also see the content as valuable and also retweet it or follow you.

Social Shares

The same concept of retweeting applies here. When someone shares your content on Facebook, it only expands the reach of that message, putting it in front of a larger audience who doesn't normally see your content, increasing your social media engagement and brand awareness. 

-You can look at things like Facebook insights and Twitter analytics to see what types of posts and tweets perform the best and then gear towards pushing out content more similar to that in order to increase engagement. 

Comments

Pretty self explanatory, this one- but being able to see what people are saying about your content provides insight into your audience’s general sentiments about your company or brand. This will allow you to capitalize on the good and, if necessary, address any negative feedback. 

Referral Traffic

This is monitoring the amount of traffic you’re getting to your website or blog from your social media sites, which is becoming increasingly important these days as social media is now the number one driver of website traffic.

There are plenty of other key social media KPIs to track and if you’d like to dive deeper into that conversation, I’d love to sit down and do exactly that with you!