Social Media Metrics: 5 Essential KPIs To Track

Social media and online marketing are two things that go hand in hand with businesses these days. Between buying up ad space and posting on your company’s page, there’s massive potential to gain attention and boost the number of sales you make.

However, many companies struggle to figure out how successful their social media efforts have been overall, especially in terms of their company pages. Fortunately, there are plenty of key performance indicators (KPIs)you can use to track your progress. If the whole list available to you seems a bit overwhelming, our picks of the top social media metrics you should pay attention to for your business will help.

Audience Growth Rate

Many companies who have recently started their social media campaigns often get too caught up in follower counts. However, forcing that number to get higher isn’t always good. Brand managers need to focus less on their follower count and more on metrics like audience growth rate.

As long as you’re gaining followers to some degree, your company’s page will be doing fine. In many cases, staying even for a little bit and having the occasional drop isn’t bad either. It’s only the massive negative spikes that you need to worry about. If you can manage an overall net gain in followers, though, you can rest easy knowing that your reach is constantly expanding.

Reach and Potential Reach

Let’s get more into the reach KPI. Every time one of your posts goes by in someone’s feed, that counts as an impression. Your reach is how many impressions you’ve received divided by the number of followers you have. Obviously, this number will never reach 100 percent since getting everybody online simultaneously isn’t possible, especially once you reach higher follower counts.

Despite that, it’s possible to have your impressions stretch past your total amount of followers when looking at your potential reach. This number considers everyone who has shared your post, and more shares will drastically increase your overall visibility. This is why the next stat is such a vital one.

Average Engagement Rate

Another thing that too many companies get hung up on is how many likes, comments, and shares they’ve obtained. While these are important, they don’t mean much out of context. Instead, you need to look at your engagement rate to get a better idea of how many people are interacting with your posts.

This ratio adds together all the various forms of engagement and divides it by the number of followers you currently have. Since anyone could theoretically like, comment, and share your post, this number has the possibility to extend past your total follower count. At the end of the day, this stat is much more crucial than your reach since you know that people took the time to look at your post instead of quickly scrolling past it.

Click-Through Rate

Still, your KPIs can go deeper than that as long as you give viewers a way to go further. You don’t have to do it in every post, but you need to be sure to include links that lead directly to your website, online store, and other forms of social media. The point of these posts is to gain attention. If you have everyone looking at you, but there’s nowhere for them to go, you’ll quickly lose them.

Once you start including links in your posts, you can begin tracking your click-through rate. This stat compares the number of clicks you got to the number of impressions the post received. Even though a click doesn’t guarantee a sale, it’s certainly a starting point for turning your followers into customers.

Conversion Rate

The last essential KPI you’ll want to track is easily the most crucial one to know: the conversion rate. If most of your clicks turn into sales, then you’ll have a solid conversion rate. You’ll start to notice the results in your monthly profits.

Of course, sales aren’t the only form of conversion that you should try to shoot for. Depending on your business model, gaining email subscribers or creating more accounts might be more worthwhile conversions. As long as you’re going through the process of turning a casual follower into a dedicated consumer, your social media posts are doing exactly what they need to.