The Top 4 Social Media Marketing KPIs Every Digital Marketer Must Know

We have written at length about the necessity of establishing key performance indicators as the definitive metric for your digital campaign. This is because in order to prove that you’re doing your job, you need to be able to benchmark your achievements. For campaigns that are making inroads towards building brand reach and nurturing leads on social networks they need to establish specific social media marketing KPIs in order to address the unique issues that come from advertising in the social world.

Success or failure must be determined quickly so that you can change your approach quickly. Check out our list of the top four social media marketing KPIs that we use to determine whether we’re on the right track or we need to retool our approach. For example, if you are doing nothing of any value on Pinterest in that no one is following or sharing your content, maybe it’s time to consider removing your presence there. On the other hand, you may discover that Slideshare is a better medium for your brand as a visually based social site. Make the change and see if it affects your followers.

However, if you’re being vastly ignored on Twitter then you are doing something wrong and you should know about it immediately to remedy the problem.

1) Social media marketing KPIs focus on followers

While this is a great indicator of your general presence in social media areas, it doesn’t automatically translate into qualified leads and revenue. Followers show that you are connected on a certain level. But how you respond to that connection will determine if you can move them from the top to the middle of the funnel.

As well, your followers can be broken down into demographics and location. Both Facebook and Twitter use analytics to reveal this info. Knowing the location of your prospects and even whether they are men or women can be one of the most important social media marketing KPIs because they can help to determine whether your brand is reaching the target buyer persona you require.

Twitter followers are important in that they can efficiently re-tweet or share your content. If your numbers are low here, consider creating better, more relevant content to your unique audience. Consider offering a valuable eBook or Whitepaper to increase interest and engagement. Let me put it this way: Twitter matters and you need those followers. Don’t leave them hanging with occasional and useless tweets. Provide useful information that answers the questions of your industry. You can learn more about these questions by “listening” on these portals with an analysis of the hashtags you choose. Intrude, intervene and inform so you can grow a presence and a following. Then analyze the data that shows:

• Your number of followers
• The Follower / following ratio
• Number of retweets
• Brand mentions
• URL mentions
• @connections

2) Keeping track of your publishing volume

A simple way to prove that you are actively engaging with your audience is by showing the frequency of your publishing. Whether it’s blogs or tweets or Facebook posts, you need to have a continual flow of successful content to these portals. If you see fluctuations in the scheme then you have to get on your sales team to start producing more material. Again, remind them how important producing industry-specific information is. Volume of material doesn’t mean producing useless content.

As well as being useful, content should also be targeting the keywords that exist on the central website pages. Everything must filter back to the site in order to encourage subscribers and followers. If you don’t have timely content arriving at least once a week, there isn’t really anything for subscribers to subscribe to. You need to get more page views for your blog.

3) Noting the number of click-throughs

Facebook has changed the way it evidences its system of metrics for analysis. You can use this info now to track every number of actions that its users take. From the number of likes, post reach and engagement, you can compare weekly statistics to verify the immediate success of a campaign. As well, you can track the specific time of day that a user acted upon your content. This is useful when re-tooling your content marketing schedule.

You can now see exactly which areas are of the most interest to visitors. If they are only viewing your timeline, perhaps that’s an indication that you should broadcast more information, limited time offers and specific benefits in that section. On the other hand, if your “insights” is receiving less attention, you may want to increase the level of info in that section.

Not receiving a targeted amount of click-throughs may mean that your audience is not comprised of qualified leads. Again, by creating better content, you will increase the reach of your posts. A rise in this metric shows that you are doing your job by engaging with higher quality leads who are eager to pass on your info to their own followers and friends.

4) Calculating your referral traffic

When looking at social media marketing KPIs, this statistic is relatively low impact. Very few sites get visited simply because they were referred to on a social site. However, if you see any growth in this area, it’s a huge deal. Beyond referrals, record the number of comments and mentions that your brand receives. All comments should be followed up because the odds are, if you ignore them, they’ll unfriend you. Twitter can even show you how many times someone mentioned you in his or her tweet.

All mentions, retweets and comments are forms of referrals, to some degree. An increase in this area proves that your presence is being felt in a tangible way, so keep following up on them.

In the end, you should also pay attention of the number of followers who unfollow you. Losing an audience is far worse than not growing one and so this should be addressed quickly.

What are the other social media marketing KPIs that you have created and follow? What are the tactics you use in order to address the analytical data?