Social media marketing is one of the most important aspects of any online marketing strategy. It allows businesses to connect with current and potential customers in a way that wasn’t possible before.
With more and more social media platforms popping up regularly, there are many ways that a brand can connect with its audience through social media.
But, like any other marketing strategy, tracking your social media marketing campaigns and the associated ROI is much needed to determine their effectiveness.
In this guide, we will look at 15 social media marketing metrics you need to track and measure the success of your campaigns.
Why Metrics Are Important To Optimize Social Media Campaigns
Social media allows businesses to share content with a broad audience and build a connection with existing (and potential) customers. This content may range from blog posts to images to videos and beyond.
And by sharing this content, businesses will help their customers learn more about them, what they stand for, and what they have to offer.
Creating a rich and engaging social media presence helps amplify your brand in a way that other digital marketing campaigns, such as paid search, could never provide.
But it’s not easy.
There are many objectives of social media marketing. Still, some of the most important ones include increasing brand awareness, driving traffic to websites or landing pages, and increasing leads or sales. This can be done using organic social media or paid campaigns.
Beyond the noticeable budgetary differences, the main difference between organic and paid social media is that organic social media relies on the platform and the audience to amplify the content.
Of course, every brand wants its posts to go viral–in a good way. However, according to SocialInsider, organic reach continues to decline on some of the most popular platforms, such as Facebook and Instagram.
On the other hand, paid social media involves paying for ads to be placed in front of a specific audience. Although a cost is involved, it provides much more control over who and how many people see your posts or ads.
Like PPC vs. SEO, both paid and organic social media have advantages and disadvantages.
Organic social media marketing is less expensive, but it may be difficult to reach a large audience without paid promotions. In contrast, paid social media marketing allows you to target a specific audience with your ads, which often results in a higher conversion rate. However, it may be costly to maintain a paid social media campaign for the long haul, especially with multiple products to support.
Overall, the best approach is possibly a combination of organic and paid social media marketing. This will allow you to reach the largest audience possible while still targeting the right people with your ads.
However, publishing a few ads and building a social following is not enough to drive social success. To drive home your message, you need to understand more about who is seeing, engaging with, and clicking on your social content.
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But, regardless of whether you’re using organic, paid social media, or both, it’s crucial to track your metrics to optimize your campaigns and ensure they are successful. This information is beneficial for businesses to optimize their social media campaigns for even greater success.
But before we get into the specific social media metrics you should be tracking, let’s look at why tracking social media analytics is vital for optimizing your campaigns.
Tracking social media marketing metrics allows you to:
- Identify what content and strategies are performing well
- Make improvements to underperforming content and strategies
- Evaluate the overall success of your social media marketing efforts
- Justify the investment in social media marketing to stakeholders
Top 15 Social Media Metrics That Matter
Now that we understand the importance of tracking social media metrics, let’s dive into the 15 key metrics you should be monitoring, broken down by the customer lifecycle stage.
Awareness Metrics
Awareness metrics are important because they help businesses track how well they achieve their goal of increasing brand awareness.
By tracking how many people see their posts and how much reach they get, businesses will see whether their social media marketing campaigns are even getting in front of their intended audience. After all, if people don’t see the ad, they have no way to engage with it.
Social media awareness metrics typically include:
- Reach: The number of unique users who saw your content
- Impressions: The number of times your content was displayed, regardless of whether it was clicked on or not
- Social media mentions: The number of times your brand was mentioned on social media
- Follower Growth Rate: The increase in the size of your social media following
These metrics give you insights into the visibility and reach of your content.
Consideration Metrics
Consideration metrics are important because they help businesses track how well they achieve their goal of getting people to consider their product or service. This block of metrics takes the user one step further down the purchase journey and helps determine if what you share resonates with them.
By tracking how many people are clicking on their links, watching their videos, or reading their blog posts, businesses are in a better position to decipher whether their social media marketing campaigns are effective or not.
Social media consideration metrics typically include:
- Engagement: The number of interactions with your content, including likes, comments, shares, and clicks
- Engagement Per Follower: Breaking down the metric above by the followers of that particular channel. This will help show how engaged your following is.
- Website traffic from social media: This metric measures how much website traffic is driven to your site through social media channels.
- Click-through Rate (CTR): This measures the number of clicks a link in your social media content receives, divided by the number of impressions it receives.
These metrics show how well your audience connects with and considers your content.
Conversion Metrics
Conversion metrics help businesses monitor how well they achieve their goal of converting leads into customers. By keeping an eye on the number of prospects or customers generated from social media, it’s easier to figure out whether social media marketing campaigns are attracting the right audience.
Social media conversion metrics typically include:
- Social media leads: The number of leads generated through social media channels.
- Social media sales: The number of purchases that are attributed to social media channels
- Goal Value: A monetary value assigned to each goal, which could include an estimated value per new lead or the revenue generated from an online transaction
- Return on investment (ROI): This metric measures the overall return on investment for your social media marketing efforts, taking into account all other metrics and their impact on sales and revenue.
These metrics demonstrate the impact of your social media efforts on achieving business goals.
Advocacy Metrics
Advocacy metrics are essential because they help businesses see how successful they have been in getting customers to become advocates for their products or service.
A social media report template helps monitor the following business metrics:
- The number of followers a business has,
- The number of shares a post has, and
- The amount of positive sentiment a post has received.
Tracking this data is essential for companies to understand whether their social media marketing campaigns effectively turn customers into loyal advocates for the brand.
Social media advocacy metrics typically include:
- Reviews: Social proof is still an essential part of any sales process, so the number of reviews (both positive and negative) on social platforms is worth tracking
- Customer satisfaction: The level of satisfaction expressed by customers on social media, such as adding reinforcing comments to posts
- Brand sentiment: The overall perception and sentiment towards your brand on social media
These metrics (although harder to measure) showcase how well your social media presence fosters brand loyalty and advocacy.
Summary & Key Takeaways
The 15 social media marketing metrics listed in this guide are crucial for businesses to measure the success of their social media marketing campaigns.
By tracking awareness, consideration, conversion, and advocacy metrics, businesses are more informed to understand what’s working well and what needs improvement or tweaks.
Additionally, connecting the dots between social media performance and the resulting web traffic, leads, and sales help businesses correlate social media marketing efforts with their bottom line.
