Want to learn social media marketing key metrics? Or above social media kpis 2021? You’re in the right place. We created this guide based on a lot of research we conducted and interviews with marketers. This post is your guide to social media marketing KPIs, but also how to use our popular KPI suite for social media management.
There are so many social media marketing key metrics out there, it can be very difficult to keep track of them all. Probably one of the most common metrics is social media kpi 2021 . But what does that actually mean? And if you’re wondering how to read social media kpi 2021, this post will certainly help you.
How to Track Your Social Media KPIs?
Given the vast amount of data involved, you need a robust social media analytics tool to stay on top of all your channels. Bonus if it takes a few quick steps. DashThis is an automated reporting tool that helps you present your hard-earned results in a beautiful social media report. All you have to do is:
Connect your favorite social media reporting tools
Select your KPIs from DashThis’ premade widgets
Drag and drop as you desire
Top Social Media KPIs to Track
Follower count
An essential metric to track, follower count tells you how many accounts are keeping up with your brand. Every platform has its own version of followers or fans. These numbers are found right on your profile page.
Impressions
Social media impressions are not the same as social media reach. Impressions tell you how many times a post or profile has been seen. It doesn’t distinguish between unique accounts, but only totals up the views. So one account could see the same post in their feed four times, which means four impressions.
There are different types of impressions that are dependent on the network that you’re looking at. On Pinterest, for example, you can see impressions per Pin. On Instagram, impressions are given for both posts and stories.
Post reach
In the social media world, post reach (a more specific metric than the overall category of reach KPIs) indicates the number of unique accounts that saw your post. Going back to the previous example, when that one account saw the same post four times, the post reach is one. Post reach is often found in the same analytics area as post impressions. Due to the differences we’ve outlined, post reach will likely be lower than impressions. For example, you’ll be able to see that a post reach of 10 unique accounts generated 50 impressions.
Reach can be roughly calculated by dividing the number of impressions by the number of followers you have. It is also readily available for some platforms.
Web traffic
Web traffic is a great way to see how well your posts with links to your website are performing, and it’s also another good measurement for campaign performance. Web referral traffic indicates the number of times someone clicked from your social media account to get to one of your website pages. This is readily available in Google Analytics or through a website builder if you have one.
This metric is useful for a number of things:
- How well a blog post is received on social media
- Success of any sales you run solely through social media
- Campaign success when you use a landing page that’s shared on social media
Share of voice
Share of voice (SOV) tells you how much online visibility you have compared to your competitors. This one doesn’t come readily available in native analytics. Instead, you’ll need to decide on keywords, hashtags or categories that you want to focus on. For example, if you want to see your SOV around topics relate to coffee, you would compile a list of hashtags and keywords to look at.
Then, you’d use a tool to gather information on how often your brand is mentioned with these words compared to the total number of times the key terms are mentioned overall. This comparison can be a manual process when you review hashtags individually, which is why a tool like Sprout offers both a hashtag report and keywords report to get a more effective overview of your SOV.
Clicks
Have you ever come across an Instagram caption where the first line was so intriguing that you just had to click to read more? Traditionally, clicks were about posts that had links that you could click on. But as social media posts have changed, so have clicks.
Clicks are everywhere. At the post level, a click could be an expansion of an Instagram caption or a tap on a Tweet to look through photos. There are also clicks that are made on your Instagram profile page and clicks you make to expand a Pin.
These numbers are found in native analytics or summarized in a tool like Sprout. As you dig into the networks you’re targeting, you’ll learn in detail which clicks they track and how they name these metrics.
Likes
Your’e familiar with double-tapping that post to show how much you enjoyed the Instagram photo. Likes and favorites indicate that the account appreciated your post enough to interact with it. And while some platforms like Instagram and Facebook are now hiding the Like count from public view, you’re still able to see these numbers in your analytics.
Shares
Post and profile shares are an excellent way to measure engagement. It means your post was so intriguing that you had to send it to someone or share it to another platform.
Shares have different names on different platforms. On Pinterest, it’s a repin; on Twitter, a retweet; on Instagram, use of the share icon to either DMs or a Story; and on Facebook, it’s still called a share but you have many options to choose from. A high share count is also an indication of how viral a post is.
Comments
Along with likes, comments are another of those essential interactions that every platform has. Comments include those on posts and livestreams. You can track these in Sprout or find them in your native analytics, either per post or totaled up for an overall count. Just like shares, comments are a good indicator of an engaging post. Your comment count can also help you figure out the bandwidth your social team has, or where they might need more resources. Not only are they meaningful as metrics, but you should also be developing a strategy to effectively manage social media comments so you’re engaging with your fans through replies and interactions.
Mentions
Mentions are when an account tags your business account or mentions your brand. It can happen in a post, in a comment, in a story or directly to you. This metric is not always tracked natively so you may need to use a social media monitoring tool like Sprout to track how and how often your brand’s accounts are mentioned.
According to a recent survey fielded by The Harris Poll on behalf of Sprout Social, 55% of consumers learn about brands on social media. Your brand is being talked about whether or not you’re tracking it. To calculate your mentions metric, use a brand keyword report to see how often your brand is mentioned online, with or without being officially tagged.
Profile visits
When someone is just learning about your company, they’ll do things like visit your website, sign up for your newsletter and check out your profile page. The profile visit count tells you how often your page has been seen in a given amount of time. This number is found in native analytics and is a good reminder to keep your profile updated with your most important link destinations.
Engagement Counts – Do They Like Your Stuff?
Now that you have a good idea of how many people are seeing your content, you will want to know how is engaging your content. To find this out, you need to measure your engagement.
Each social media platform has their own unique ways for users to interact. However, most fall into likes, reactions or favorites, retweets, shares, reposts, comments or replies. And these are what we call engagements.
Unless you are going through a total social media crisis, engagements are a great thing.
Engagements mean that your content is leading users out of their mindless scrolling to interact with your post. In this day and age, that in itself, is a feat worth celebrating.
With few exceptions, highly-engaging content will be boosted in the algorithm. Thus, it will result in a higher post reach and post impressions.
Moreover, you can benchmark your engagement in order to see how you perform versus your competition or measure your own performance over time.
To do this, calculate your engagement rate, which converts your engagements into a single number. Then, instead of counting the various engagements from all the platforms and accounts, you can create a single metric.
Brand Mentions – Are They Talking About You?
Brand mentions are another important social media marketing metric to include in your regular reports. As this can help you understand brand awareness and sentiment. It comes specially handy to alert you of PR situations ahead.
While not as easy to measure as post reach, impressions, or engagement, brand mentions can often be more valuable.
For instance, if your brand that is being talked about positively on social media, or gaining user generated content, it will increase its digital footprint.
It is also a solid display of relevance.
Simply put: you could be earning customers without even posting anything.
As we previously stated, measuring brand mentions can be a little tricky unless you use a social listening tool like Keyhole, or other sentiment analysis tools.
You can also search your brand’s hashtag using a hashtag analytics tool or the platform search engine. This will give you a general picture of how your brand is being discussed on social media.
Among many key features, Keyhole gives you straight-forward data, making it easy to understand and report your social media presence.
Conclusion:
Depending on where you work, the social metrics you’re tracking might be a bit different from your colleagues. But, there are certain social media metrics most businesses want to track: Engagement Rate Share of Sentiment Reach of Social Media Posts Only a handful of people know how to track these vital social media metrics and if you’re looking for training in social media marketing key metrics, then this article is for you!