Every marketer knows that in order to communicate effectively, you need to select your channels depending on where your audience’s attention is focused. Several decades ago, this may have been print magazines, but in the digital era, people are glued to social media – particularly since the mass adoption of mobile internet in recent years.
In fact, there are now 2.789 billion active mobile social media users worldwide, and this figure will only continue to rise in the years to come.
But despite the benefits of reaching a large audience through social media marketing, determining the efficacy of your campaigns can be challenging.
80% of marketers say that engagement (including likes and shares) is one of the top metrics they use to assess their social media campaigns. Website traffic is another commonly used, but incomplete metric.
But in addition to engagement and website traffic, there are a many useful KPIs which are typically overlooked. With this in mind, it’s no surprise that 46% of B2B marketers are unsure whether any social channels have generated revenue for their business.
If you’re serious about using social media marketing to engage your audience, and drive long-term profits for your business, here are five additional social media KPIs that are worth consideration in your process.
1. Share of Voice
It’s important to monitor the extent to which people are mentioning your brand, and whether these mentions are generally positive or negative.
However, to take things a step further, I recommend using a handy tool called Social Mention to assess your brand’s mentions in comparison to your competitors. When you know how you stack up against the competition, you can analyze the best performing competitors and see what they’re doing differently to you.
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Log into Social Mention and then type the name of your brand in quotation marks in the search box. You’ll be able to see many useful metrics, most importantly – the percentage of positive, neutral and negative social media mentions about your brand.
Use the tool to research your competitors and then build a share of voice database.
2. Problems Resolved
These days, people expect to be able to discuss customer service issues with their favorite brands using social media – in fact, 78% of people who complain about a brand on Twitter expect a response within the hour.
Every marketer knows that it’s wise to respond to questions and resolve problems as quickly as possible. After all, people buy from brands they trust, and a lot of trust can be gained or lost based on how you operate on social media.
By keeping a database of customer problems that you’ve resolved using social media, you can turn helpfulness into a measurable KPI. While more customer questions could indicate a problem with your products or services, the more customers you can help using social media – the better.
As a customer myself, it’s not always the companies with the best products that get my business – it’s often the ones that are the most helpful.
3. Number of Comments
Do you know the average amount of comments you get per social media post? If not, I highly recommend tracking this.
Likes and shares are useful metrics, but comments are more indicative of emotional resonance. It’s important to post high quality, engaging content that people can’t resist voicing their opinion on.
In my experience, when you post content that takes a firm stand on a particular issue, you’ll alienate some people and elicit a strong response from others. Both sides love to comment, and your chances of going viral increase exponentially.
If you’re only getting likes and shares but no comments, think about how you can be more polarizing (without being offensive) and engaging on social media.
4. Website Traffic From Social Media as a Percentage
If you’re focusing your time and energy on social media marketing, you want to ensure that this is reflected in terms of the percentage of people who are arriving at your site thanks to social media.
If you’re engrossed in social media everyday, yet the majority of people arrive at your website from referrals or emails, this indicates that you need to make some alterations to your strategy.
It’s helpful to know the percentage of social media traffic of your competitors, so you can understand industry benchmarks and emulate the most successful brands in your niche. As a market research tool, I highly recommend Similarweb.
In addition to seeing a breakdown of traffic sources for any competitor you want, Similarweb also enables you to view data for which social media channels are performing best – although this data isn’t always available for smaller websites.
5. Conversions
One of the basic premises of social media marketing is aiming to provide value to your audience through useful and entertaining content, rather than going for the hard sell. If you’re only using social media to sell to your audience, people will run for the hills quickly.
With that being said, sales are the lifeblood for any business. If you don’t eventually turn your engaged social media followers into paying customers, your social media efforts will be wasted.
It’s good to record the click-through rate for your social media posts and overall website traffic – but be sure to monitor the number of people who are visiting your site from social media who eventually convert (by signing up to your email list or making a purchase).
With Google Analytics, you can track practically every website conversion goal – this will enable you to measure the long-term ROI of your social media campaigns.
Featured image via Pixabay