Social media offers profitable opportunities for marketers. But like other channels, social media marketing needs to be measured in order to be effective. If you’ve read any top tips for social media marketing, you’re now ready to start measuring your social media marketing campaigns.
In this article, we’re going to show you how to measure social media marketing performance using social media KPIs. We’ll talk about How to measure leads on social media. We’ll use Facebook marketing as an example, but many of the principles can be applied to other channels.
Social media KPI
Before you can start measuring your leads on social media, it’s important to understand some key metrics.
1 Engagement
Engagement is how much your audience interacts with your brand through social media. It may seem like a vague term, and that’s because it encompasses many sub-metrics. Each social media platform has its own engagement metrics, but on Facebook engagement includes:
- Likes
- Comments
- Shares
- Clicks
Measuring engagement is useful because it shows you how big your audience is, how much they’re liking your content and how they feel about your brand. With this data, you can tweak to improve your content or decide to build your audience if you need to.
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2 Awareness
Measuring awareness helps you to understand how many people have seen your brand and how far your influence has spread. Awareness is particularly useful if your goals are to increase brand awareness. It can also be compared and contrasted with your engagement metrics, showing you how effective your campaigns actually are at generating engagement.
Within awareness, you look at two key sub-metrics:
Impressions
Impressions are the number of times posts show up in people’s timelines. While this is an important metric, it’s rarely used on its own. By comparing your impressions with your engagement, you can see if your posts are having the effect you want, whether that be generating discussion about a new product or inspiring clicks to your website.
Reach
Reach is the number of unique people who saw your content. With Facebook marketing, you can measure reach for your page or individual posts. You can also measure organic reach and paid reach separately, and even explore viral reach. Reach has an impact on your engagement metrics.
3 Share of voice
If you are using paid advertising as part of your Facebook marketing campaign, you’ll want to measure share of voice. This lets you see how many people are talking about your brand compared to your competitors (volume). But you should also take into account sentiment when looking at share of voice, in other words, are people discussing your brand in a positive or negative way?
4 Referrals
By measuring referrals, you can see how people landed on your website. You can compare how many referrals you got from each source, and make decisions to improve your campaigns. Within Facebook, you can see when people click through to your website from a post or profile, or by sharing content.
It’s also useful to compare referrals from your various social media accounts. This will help you understand where your audience likes to hang out and where you can best reach them.
5 Demographics
This metric is great for understanding your audience, which is a crucial element to the success of your campaigns. On Facebook, for example, you can look at demographic information about your fans (people who like your page) and compare this to people engaged and people reached.
Use this valuable information to tailor your content to your audience. This metric helps you better understand your audience’s interests and tastes, as well as what times of day they are active and when you should post content to reach their feeds.
6 Conversions
Conversions reveal how many people took the desired action, like making a purchase or signing up for a program. This is one of the most important social media KPIs because it shows you how successful your campaigns have been. Also, by comparing the profits you make from conversions with your social media marketing budget, you can get a good idea of your return on investment (ROI).
Other metrics
The metrics discussed above are just some of the basic metrics used in Facebook marketing as well as other platforms like Twitter, SnapChat and Instagram. However, there are many other metrics that you can use to your advantage, including response rates for customer care, visits to your page and statistics around video.
How to measure leads on social media
Now that you have a good grounding in many of the key metrics, let’s examine how you can measure leads on social media. We suggest using a tool to help you measure your leads, crunch the numbers, and reveal how you can improve your campaigns to maximise success.
Facebook Insights
Facebook Insights is Facebook’s very own tool for measuring success. With this tool, you can measure many of the metrics we discussed above, and many other advanced metrics if you want to take your campaigns to the next level. This tool is useful if you are using Facebook marketing exclusively.
Salesforce
Salesforce is a customer relationship manager which lets you measure your campaigns across all your paid advertising channels from social media to Google Ads. In this way, Salesforce gives you a holistic overview of your marketing campaigns and also lets you compare this to your business goals and overall ROI. To find out more, read about how to integrate paid media channels with Salesforce.
Key take-aways
Measuring your success in social media campaigns is extremely important. Without measuring success, you’ll never know how to improve your campaigns. By using the above metrics, you can better understand your audience, their preferences, and what kind of content to create to best communicate with them. Remember to use a tool like Facebook Insights or Salesforce to measure your social media KPIs and understand your return on investment.