Understanding Social Media KPIs

Social media is largely influential. There are over 3 billion users worldwide — nearly 50% of the world population — which is why you need to measure your social media campaigns and understand if your company’s social media marketing strategy is working or how to improve it. While all social media platforms are unique and have their own ways of measuring account performance, there is some common terminology they all utilize. Let’s look at what social media KPIs (Key Performance indicators) are most common and how to understand and measure them to your business’s advantage.

Defining Social Media KPIs

Setting realistic social media marketing goals begins with understanding what you are working with. Here we define the common social media KPIs and why it is important to understand them.

Likes

These are when a user views your post and decides to engage with the content by “liking.” These can be found as a total number on a single social media post. Measuring likes can help in understanding which parts of your social media content are most consumed by your audience. The more likes your post has, the more you are creating unique and enjoyable content for your audience. 

Shares

These are when a user goes a step further into engaging with your social media post. By sharing, they provide your post to all of their followers or friends. This increases your reach and impressions, which can bring lots of traffic to your social media account or website, depending on the content within the post. Shares are a great indicator of how well your content-creation skills are coming along. 

Comments

These can be found as a total number on a single social media post. Comments help you measure user engagement on your social media posts and offer a direct understanding on what your audience’s opinion on your social media content. Comments can be increased by making sure all social content is easy to engage with, such as by asking open-ended questions or replying quickly to user comments.

Followers

These are online users that have decided to follow your account. These users have showed enough interest to choose to continuously view your content. Follower growth is important to measure because it indicates if your content is easy to engage with and can lead to conversions. You can calculate follower growth by taking your (current number of followers – past number of followers) divided by your past number of followers. Take that number and multiply by 100, and you have a Follower Growth Rate.

Link Clicks

These are when a user decides to single out your social media post by looking at it more closely. A large number of clicks but a low number of likes and shares on a post indicate that your post grabbed attention but did not encourage engagement. Clicks are important to understand because it is the first point of engagement users perform. Make sure to always create attention-grabbing content for your social media posts to ensure clicks.

Post Reach

This is how many users have seen your social media post. Timing and content affect reach — such as uploading when your followers or audience is most active on the platform or what kind of unique content or images are within your post.

Impressions

This is the number of times a post appeared in a user’s social media feed. However, not all impressions are unique because one user can see it multiple times. Impressions can be defined differently by each platform, so make sure to check your social media platform’s exact definition. Impressions are useful to understand when comparing an impression-to-reach ratio because it can show who your post captured attention from. Users who view posts multiple times are more likely to engage. 

Click-Through-Rates

This is how many times a user clicked on a call-to-action (CTA) link in one of your posts. This helps measure engagement and conversion rates. Understanding your Click-Through-Rate (CTR) is important when comparing what CTAs are best working for your social media. Make sure all your CTAs are short, to-the-point and command attention from your followers.

Find What's Best For Your Business

Understanding what these KPIs mean is the cornerstone to success in social media marketing. However, these are just the starting point for understanding and measuring social media marketing metrics for your business. There are many KPIs to look at when optimizing your business’s social media strategy. Focus on the social media KPIs that are most applicable and relevant to the individual social media platform you are posting on, and make sure to note which KPIs work best for your business and its marketing goals. 

Don’t know where to start with your social media marketing strategy for your business? Reach out to us, we'd be glad to help.