Metrics That Matter for Social Media KPIs Tracking

If you want to attract local customers, you need to be on social media. That much is a given in the age of Facebook virality, and other digital avenues for word of mouth.

Marketers at multi-location businesses have their work cut out for them these days. Consider that more than half of the world’s population uses social media on a regular basis, with the average user clocking almost 2.5 hours of searching daily. That’s a huge opportunity for your business to get found and be chosen online.

But when you’re trying to keep up with multiple outlets for prospective customers, you need to have A) a plan and B) the right data. A data-driven strategy ensures you stay on top of things, and avoid getting overwhelmed by too much information.

Your social media marketing strategy needs to include social media KPIs that help you gauge successes.

With the right KPIs, companies can measure success across organic social as well as paid social ads. Which social KPIs should you focus on, though?

A World of Changing Channels and Algorithms

The social media landscape shifts constantly because of the social media platforms themselves. Take, for example, what’s happened to Twitter, now known as X, over the last 12 months—a new owner, a rebrand, and plenty of content and advertising challenges.

While at one time Twitter offered the platform of choice for gathering news, quick opinions, and discussion, X now faces an exodus of both advertisers and users. Where to? Audiences continue to disperse across a plethora of platforms both old and new, complicating native social media KPI tracking for your average location-based marketer. Those platforms’ algorithms can also tell when you’re gaming the system, penalizing marketers who try to test their boundaries.

That said, when it comes to attracting local customers for multi-location businesses, a few trusted platforms still come out on top. Facebook sits at the top in terms of their sheer number of monthly users. With roughly three billion monthly active users in the second quarter of 2023, they maintain a strong base and should remain a target for local social media success. Likewise, forecasters predict that Facebook’s sister company Instagram will hit 1.44 billion monthly active users by 2025.

Outside the Metaverse, TikTok continues to grow in short video, a key content format for attracting real interest, affording some of the best ROI. Although it appears sixth on the list of most popular social networks worldwide as of October 2023, TikTok’s 1.2 million monthly active users are incredibly engaged, spending around 95 minutes every day on the app, leaping to over 5 hours per day for 20% of their Gen Z users. Users value short-form content so highly that many other platforms now prioritize shorter formats and reels—even YouTube.

Which Social Media KPIs Matter Most?

Accurate KPIs can tell us the entire success story at a granular level. And the good news is: established social media platforms offer a wide range of native in-app metrics.

A 10-Step Guide to Defining, Tracking, and Optimizing Your Social KPIs

1. Define your objectives: Clearly outline your social media goals, whether it's increasing brand awareness, driving website traffic, or boosting sales.

2. Identify relevant metrics: Select specific KPIs aligned with your objectives, such as engagement rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, or customer acquisition cost.

3. Understand your audience: Analyze your target audience to determine which metrics resonate most with them and align with your business priorities.

4. Utilize platform analytics: Leverage the built-in analytics tools of social media platforms to gather data on performance, audience demographics, and content effectiveness.

5. Set benchmarks and goals: Establish realistic benchmarks based on historical data and set measurable goals to track progress over time.

6. Implement tracking tools: Use third-party tools or software to consolidate and analyze data from multiple social media platforms, ensuring a comprehensive overview of your performance.

7. Monitor and analyze data: Consistently review your KPI data, looking for trends, patterns, and areas of improvement, to inform ongoing adjustments to your social media strategy.

8. Adjust strategies as needed: Based on the insights gained, adapt your social media tactics and content strategies to better align with your objectives and maximize performance.

9. Consider customer feedback: Incorporate qualitative data, such as customer feedback and sentiment analysis, to gain a holistic understanding of how your social media efforts are perceived.

10. Report and communicate results: Summarize and communicate your findings regularly with key stakeholders, fostering a data-driven approach to social media decision-making.

Decoding Crucial Metrics for Social Media Triumph

Let’s delve into the heartbeat of social media success: social KPIs that illuminate the effectiveness of your strategies. From engagement rates to conversion metrics, we discover the metrics that not only measure but elevate your social media impact, providing invaluable insights for informed decision-making and optimization.

Engagement

Social media engagement has been one of the most common KPIs since the dawn of social. But the type of engagement that rings truest as a social media metric depends on the ultimate goals for your content:

• Likes help you to see where content is striking a chord with customers’ interests.

• Comments and shares help to expand reach as part of organic social.

• Mentions and Share of Voice reflects your presence in the minds of users.

• Saves or bookmarks show what the audience plans to reconsider in the future.

• Click-through rates show whether your content compels people immediately.

• Dwell time or repeat views show that audiences keep coming back for more.

Impressions

Another old-school social media metric is impressions. These can help you to measure visibility, but only as a starting point. Visibility doesn’t mean your content is reaching the right audience; you’ll need to dive deeper with social media analytics to understand the effectiveness of those impressions on a finer level.

Conversions

Conversions as a social KPI serve as the ultimate litmus test for the effectiveness of your social media efforts. It’s a tangible measure of how well your audience translates engagement into desired actions, be it making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or completing any other predefined goal. Monitoring conversion rates not only quantifies success but also guides strategic refinements, ensuring your social media strategy aligns seamlessly with overarching business objectives.

Return on Investment

Return on Investment (ROI) as a social KPI is the financial compass guiding the profitability of your social media endeavors. It quantifies the value generated relative to the resources invested, encapsulating the monetary gains derived from social campaigns.

Consider approaching your social media successes by measuring the marketing efficiency ratio. Have you found overall increased sales or subscriptions, and can you attribute that to social media marketing in any way? Look at a blend of advertising spend and resources, not just the success of any individual channel. Just because a conversion isn’t directly attributed to a specific channel does not mean that channel delivered zero value as part of the audience’s journey.

Sentiment analysis

One social media KPI that’s gaining importance is sentiment analysis, an incredibly powerful and effective social media metric for taking your audience’s pulse.

Sentiment analysis tools deploy AI to analyze reviews and comments across platforms. Using machine learning, they track the topics of discussion, extract topical trends, and assess whether people respond positively, negatively, or neutrally to your brand for you to know where you need to adapt or improve your strategies.

Building A Community: The Long-Term Plan For Effective Social

Marketing gurus believe the best way towards social success is less about tracking follower counts, and more about building a community. And we agree!

Effective social media metrics in the long term should be seen as building a memory structure. It’s planting the seeds to help you stay top of mind, not chasing short-term social media KPIs. Short-term social media efforts look to attract a wider social media reach and impressions, while the long-term approach focuses on building loyalty in the long run.

Driving engagement involves responding to comments and showcasing your brand’s own voice. Listen, respond, and evaluate your approach on a regular basis. Most of all, be authentic. The best way to build a loyal, engaged audience is to showcase your personality alongside a steady approach to what your brand represents. Treat your audience with compassion: get your voice out there and show you care.

What’s The Best Approach to Social Media KPI Tracking?

Care and compassion demand a joined-up approach. When building a social media strategy for your multi-location business, make sure you coordinate with your team, especially community managers and digital content managers, to ensure alignment on approach, content, schedules, and overall goals as your strategy evolves.

That joined-up approach extends to how you interact with each individual social media platform. Handling multiple sources of information across social media analytics can prove more of a hindrance than a help. When it comes to social media KPI tracking, the most helpful approach is through an analytics tool or dashboard such as Uberall.

For the best chance of success across organic social and paid social ads, you want a platform that can adapt as social media adapts, suitable for teams that keep their platform growing constantly. Most importantly, though, it’s all about your audience. Social media KPIs mark a journey you take together with your brand, your partners, and your audience: so listen, respond, evaluate, and grow!

Get in touch to discover how Uberall can help you stay on top of social media KPIs, and build that long-term, community-driven approach through effective social media KPI tracking.