Social media marketing is here to stay. To determine “how well you’re doing on social media”, does one respond with words or numbers? While data trumps words every time in the world of marketing, it is important to show how those numbers are achieving business goals. Whether working solo, with an agency, or an in-house digital marketing team, it’s essential to ensure that the correct digital marketing and business key performance indicators (KPIs) are measured. Simply put, social media marketing KPIs are metrics utilised by marketing agencies and teams to track and quantify the performance of campaigns. But which social media marketing KPIs should you be measuring on a regular basis to ensure your campaign is on the right track? We’ve rounded up the top three metrics your digital marketing teams should focus on.

Engagement Rate

Some social media experts believe that engagement is the number one area that every social media marketer should be concerned with on social media. It is the catalyst for ensuring improvement in all of the other social media KPIs. Engagement measures the number of shares, comments and likes that your social media platforms receive. Having a large reach with low engagement is not a good sign because it depicts that you don’t have a marketing content that resonates with people. Thus, reaching millions of people means nothing if they are not interested in your products or services. As long as your target audience is engaged in your content, it will grow organically and generate more leads. In addition, engagement plays a key role in how many people see your updates regularly on platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

Leads

When your marketing activities start gaining traction on your social media account, it is quite easy to be so engulfed in the number of likes and shares you are getting. However, are you getting the best ROI? To ensure you are getting the best ROI from your social media, you have to ask the tough question: Out of the fans that are engaged with your products online, how many of them are really interested in purchasing your product or service? You might have an enormous following on Facebook or Instagram because people love your posts or photos respectively, but how does that translate to new sales? You cannot answer the above question if you are not measuring your lead generation from social media marketing. As a result, if you are not generating leads, your content is perhaps not engaging to your ideal audience, or you are using the wrong platform to sell your product. You have to start tracking in order to be able to see these leads. You can also gain valuable insight by looking at the demographic breakdown of the people who are engaging with your content on a daily basis.

ROI (Return on Investment)

ROI stands for “return on investment” and what that means for your social media strategy is dependent on your organization’s goals and objectives. But generally speaking, social media ROI includes all of your social media actions that create tangible value. Thus, you’re thinking after all the resources, money and time spent, what’s the return? The usual formula used in calculating this return is: ROI = (return – investment) / investment. However, before this, you want to know which goals and actions to track and you want to go about tracking that goal. For instance, Google Analytics allows you to set up goals, and event tracking to enable you to track website actions like the number of downloads, sales, and signups. After that, you will need to attach a monetary value to your actions. This is a good way to track how much money you are spending on your social media strategy and how much you are earning from it.

How to Measure ROI in Social Media. Source, buffer.com.

The above marketing KPIs are definitely useful in not just helping you track how your marketing strategy is faring on social media but it also allows you improve efficiency in the types of social media platforms you use in your marketing strategy. Other KPIs that are also efficient are tracking conversion rate, click through rate, the overall sentiment of the strategy, reach and measuring the overall number of customers acquired through social media marketing.