Social Media Metrics: What or How to Measure Social Media Marketing KPIs

You must have heard it being said in meetings and webinar introductions that there is a need to measure performances. That sounds very professional and business-like, not to mention goal-oriented and focused. But what to do you do when it comes to social media? You end up relying on the number of ‘friends’ and ‘followers’ that you have added during a period of time, like you used to do in 2009? Well, that doesn’t work anymore, not even for start-ups with little or no idea about social media marketing, let alone metrics.

How to define your social media metrics or key performance indicators (KPIs)

To begin measuring your performance on social media networks, the first step you need to take is outline a goal or objective. What are you hoping to achieve through Facebook or Twitter? Adding random friends and followers cannot be a valid metric. The reason is simple: most of the people you add up are actually online marketers like you or simply spam profiles! You get nowhere by having those people on your social media profile.

Not Followers, focus on Shares or Likes or Real Comments

Instead, think in terms of ‘Share’s or ‘Like’s and also the number of online visits you get to your page. Track how many of them are coming to your website or clicking on the web links you have provided on your profile page.

How you are engaging with your target audience

The next metric to measure social media performance is to figure out if you are reaching out to your target consumer group. Conduct a profile check on people who are on your social media page. Do they fit the consumer group that you are targeting? If they fit in, you can engage them in fruitful social media chatter and get them to add more people like themselves to your network.

That can happen only if the people you have on your page are actually interested in your product or service. That, in turn, depends on what kind of consumer groups you have added to your page! So, this circle of engagement is very essential.

Use of Social Media Analytics Tools

There are tons of social media tools to help you measure these statistics. They are mostly free or charge a nominal sum. Get them onboard and look at this money-spinning platform of social media with fresh eyes. You have to unlearn many of the bad or obsolete habits you have carried as baggage so far! But it’s worth doing so than being swamped away by emerging trends!

Measuring Social Metrics and Maximizing KPI Tracking

With the advancement of time, a new thing has been added to SEO or Search Engine Optimization and that is called social media. In the present day, this has been widely accepted by the marketing professionals as an effective business tool.

It, really, does not matter whether you have a sales based business or any other kind of business, the different techniques of SMM or Social Media Marketing brings in prospective results. Creating quality content as well as engaging the target audiences in diverse social media activities, being the two most effective methods, are being adapted and widely used by the different businesses or to be specific, by the different companies. Now, as we all know, any and everything needs to be quality checked. In fact, everything requires a performance check.

At this point of time, the question, which comes to our mind, is how to do so? As for any and every kind of performance check, social media even has got some social metrics that are solely dedicated to measure the performance of it. However, every organisation needs to prepare a plan to utilise those social metrics in such a way that apart from measuring the social media performance, it even helps one maximise the KPI or Key Performance Indicator tracking.

Since, a huge amount of attention is received by this media from the web users it attracts lot of interest from the marketing professionals as well. Thus, at times, it actually becomes a bit difficult to measure the performance till the bottom line.

However, the expert professionals working on the fields of Search Engine Optimisation as well as Social Media Marketing know how to do so. There are some specific techniques, which need to be applied for the purpose. But, in case the social media activities are not measured in a proper manner, then in place of maximising the KPI tracking. Let us check out how to measure it:

The first and the foremost thing, which one needs to check is which is that social media forum that you want to track the performance of. It is because there are some unique social metrics, which varies from one social media platform to another.

There are some common ones as well that even helps one in getting an overall idea about the performance of any kind of social media activity done on that forum.

Most Common Key Social Media Metrics

Following are some of the key metrics of the analytics world of social media that most people are interested in:

• Fan data: Even known as the “Follower data”, this metric assists one to trace the number of people he or she has in their social media network and the way they are growing.
• Performance of social content: As the name suggests, this metric assists one in measuring the performance of the content, which they are creating on the varied social sites like Google+, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin etc.
• Social communication data: This metric provides the data related to thesharing and re-sharing of the concerned content and how they are interacting with others on the social sites.
• Traffic data: This is the metric, which measures how many visitors a site is driving in.

The most important 5 social media metrics are in simple terms –

1. Volume
2. Reach
3. Engagement
4. Influence
5. Share of voice

Social Media ROI – How to Approach it

Measuring social media ROI is not easy. There are a few handy procedures to calculate effective social media benefits. Let us explore them. Content, advertising, research, leads are different tools to calculate the level of benefits.

You need to focus on the tactics for reaching a well-defined goal metrics to achieve ROI opportunities. Now, let us have a look at the social media tactic planning procedures.

Well-defined metrics to compare different tactics:

Effective scale measurements (high, low) are needed to aid different scoring process on the basis of business priorities. Resources, timings, goal alignment, risk factor and budget are other deciding factors of that score.

Different brainstorm tactics are for business and user goals:

There is a wide range of options to choose from. It can range from relevance methodology to magnetic campaign. Different brainstorm possible factors like, testimonies, leads, user-generated contents, comments, web traffic, social shares, legal considerations, and support costs are involved in this particular tactic.

The list of benefits and costs:

The aim should be the high level objectives like reducing costs, growing revenue, and ultimately improving satisfaction. In order to avoid potential risks, you need to estimate the probabilities of its occurrence. It is important to compute the estimated level of benefit and costs.

In order to leverage benefits, you need to focus on a list of effective processes. You need to do a cost based analysis. It is important to determine the difference between total cost and total benefits. It is important to weigh different factors to score different tactics for comparing different candidates.

The most difficult part of the “tactics selection” process is comparing costs with benefits. Marketers agree on the point that social media metrics are available. Still a bit of confusion remained in the process of measuring the actual level of benefit.

If the core business objectives can be followed, it will become easier to grow revenue, reduce cost, and the ultimate goal of improving satisfaction. This way finding the gateway to real benefit formulas become easier and effective. Once you jump into the process, it does not remain much difficult anymore.

Measuring Social Engagement Responsible for The Company’s Growth

It is never a very easy task to measure the impact of the social efforts on your company. All the metrics offering you loads of data and charts cannot explain clearly what amount of benefit such data are doing to your organization. Webmasters and several other people involved in the business are so engrossed in proving their mettle that they often forget to measure why they took the pain to increase the numbers and figures on the charts explaining, traffic, visits, growth rate, conversion rate etc of the site.

A walk through the roads of measuring all the social efforts that go in the process of making a website a success will make you understand why such efforts are worth toiling for. Such metrics for measuring your social efforts are not procedures that are done on one moment and forgotten on the next. You need to chalk out plans for constant efforts that can keep the results of such efforts buoy for a long period.

It is important to have similar metrics throughout the organization to achieving the key results and objective of the company. Social media remains almost at the top level of SEO. Therefore, the goal for such efforts remains increasing the number of visitors to the site and engagement or improving the quality of customer service. The number of sales or subscribers is not the biggest concern of the group involved in the social media marketing process for the site.

Goals for Social Media Efforts:

Work should go on the basis of an ‘Objectives and Key Results (OKR)’ procedure where the objectives are engagement, increasing traffic flow to the site and amount of customers flowing through the user engagement and marketing funnel.

The key results should be at least 25% non-paid traffic at the end of the 2^nd Quarter. The basic roadmap has a goal of 5% increase in engagement with community and a 15% growth in the traffic from social.

Effective Engagement Metrics:

The main aim behind all social media efforts is engagement. However, engagement is not an exact figure like followers or buyers. The amount denotes a sketchy figure of interaction of social media users with the brand. All the social channels are different from one another and the process of engagement is different for each. Still most of them have the same metrics viz. Amplification, Conversation, Economic value and Applause.

# Conversation

The statistics is measured by the number of conversations for each post. In case of Pinterest, the reply is received through a pin. Similarly, replies come as a comment to a Facebook post, photo to Instagram and reply to a tweet.

#Amplification

Amplification comes through sharing, resharing, reposts and retweets.

#Applause

Social media encourages special expressions of applause. Users hit the ‘favorites’ button on Twitter, likes on Facebook, plusses on Google+ (G+ is deprecated now) and thumbs up on most of the blogs. The number of thumbs up hits measures the amount of applause a post has received.

#Economic Value

This is the collective cost savings from the long and short term cost savings by the organization.

Calculate the Uncountable Figures: 

TruSocialMetrics has made the task easier for webmasters as they have their own methods structured for easing out your troubles. You just need to sign in for taking its help in measuring all such uncountable figures as mentioned above. The free version offers data history of a month and measuring data related to 12 social networks. The paid versions offer you even more.

It is good to have metrics on a weekly basis, maintaining monthly reports and sending it to all the staff for tracking the progress of the metrics in the previous month. You can maintain spreadsheets containing all the data and numbers related to the replies, reposts, repins, posts, shares, RTs, Conversation rates or amplification rates and can share them with your clients as and when needed.

Social media is not always an easy nut to crack. It is not easy to explain the ascent of your organization through the ladders of conversation, amplification or applause. However, an honest attempt to do so can help in the complete marketing process for the company.

Quick List Of Few Important Social Media Metrics

If you are using hootsuite you can get the following social media metrics.

Awareness metrics

1. Brand Awareness
2. Audience Growth Rate
3. Post reach
4. Potential reach
5. Social Share of Voice (SSOV)

Engagement Metrics

1. Applause rate
2. Average engagement rate
3. Amplification rate
4. Virality rate

Conversion Metrics

1. Conversion rate
2. Click Through rate (CTR)
3. Bounce rate
4. Cost per click
5. Cost per thousand impressions (CPM)

Customer Metrics

1. Customer reviews
2. Customer satisfaction score (CSAT)
3. Customer Loyalty Score or Net Promoter Score

Video Metrics on Facebook

With Google making life simpler for online marketers with every single initiative, you don’t expect Facebook to sit tight, do you? Google has offered so much for online marketers using video content through YouTube and other platforms. Now it’s the turn of Facebook. Facebook started offering some unique video metrics that make it easier for internet marketers to gather data about the videos that they are posting online. Here is a rundown of what you can expect from the new video metrics on Facebook:

• Audience Reaction: The video metrics will help you realize which videos are able to capture the attention of the viewers and which ones are simply draining their interest. With data like percentage of views on videos, you will be able to quickly figure out if the video has repeat watchers or people are simply not interested in watching the entire video. You can get something similar to page view time on Google Analytics. This will help you understand what kind of video content Facebook users want from you and attune your videos to that effect.

• Number of Views: Videos, like online content of other genres, are as good as the number of people who view them. In this regard, it is imperative for online marketers to find out how many online users are checking out a particular video. The new video metric of Facebook will offer you that advantage. If a user watches a video for 3 seconds or more, it will register as a video view. This will include videos that automatically appear on News Feed. When a user clicks on such News Feed videos, it will be registered as clicks to play video.

• Demographic Data: Finally, this is one aspect of the new Facebook video metric that will be very useful for online marketers targeting local areas and specific consumer groups. By using the user information uploaded on Facebook profile, the demographic data metric will offer you statistics about viewer location, age and other pointers. Online marketers can unveil a wealth of analytical data with the use of demographic data on Facebook video watchers.