A social media plan requires much thought and planning. One begins by deciding upon a target audience and deciding whether or not to focus on brand or product exposure, lead generation, or increased sales. Yet even after that, you have a ways to go before you reach your destination. And how do you evaluate success once you’ve completed your campaign and arrived at its conclusion?

You need to identify what matters most for your organisation and establish benchmarks amid the flood of data supplied by both built-in and third-party social media analytics platforms. Not only is it important to keep a close eye on your progress on a daily basis, but also to conduct periodic audits.

In this post, we’ll go through the key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics (metrics) for social media marketing that you should be tracking, documenting, and interpreting.

Why is it important to track your social media success?

Good methods and social media advice you get online aren’t enough to succeed in today’s world of fierce competition. If you haven’t already, make 2020 the year you finally put strategic thinking to good use in your marketing. In-depth social media audits may shed light on customer habits in the digital sphere, allowing you to adjust your strategy accordingly. You need to regularly audit your processes to understand the source of your outcomes.

Which metrics are most important to track?

There is a plethora of indicators you may monitor and examine, therefore it is essential to sort through and prioritise data. To help you get a full picture of your social performance, we’ve chosen a small set of universal indicators.

You may optimise your social media strategy by tracking metrics like engagement, reach, follower growth, customer happiness, and the customer journey. While determining the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) by which your social performance will be evaluated, take in mind the following:

Basics again: the engagement rate

Likes, comments, shares, retweets, and any other kind of user interaction on social media are where you should start. At the end of the day, social media without participation is simply media.

Provide engaging material while keeping your intended readers in mind, add in some interactivity, and never stop providing excellent service. These are the fundamentals that will get people talking about your company, whether it’s through personal recommendations or the social ranking algorithms that will show their activity to their peers.

During a social media audit, there are two approaches to evaluate audience participation:

You may determine the average or median amount of likes, comments, retweets, and shares by breaking down each form of involvement into its own data set.
Another option is to look at the engagement rate, which provides a single numerical value to represent the amount of interaction with the published material. This user-friendly format makes it simple to assess the impact of your material over time and across audit periods. Worry not; social analytics solutions will automatically determine the engagement rate for you.

By keeping track of your metrics, you can evaluate your progress over time. Examine the most popular posts to find out what about them inspired so much interaction from your followers.

Evaluation of Reach – How Big Is Your Audience?

All of the major social media sites use the same methodology to determine a post’s reach. According to Facebook, this is the total number of people that saw your Page or anything related to it in their news feed. In layman’s terms, the measure indicates the size of the audience for your material.

Instagram, it would appear, places a premium on exposure to a wide audience. Because the site no longer shows likes, this number will indicate how well your content has helped promote your brand.

Keep track of your expanding number of followers

A large audience is meaningless if it is not made up of your intended demographic. If you want to make money off of your material, you better make sure the people you’re talking to are actually going to become consumers. That is, if they don’t have devoted followers.

Be sure to keep tabs on your increasing number of followers, as this should lead to a rise in both interaction and total traffic. Check for increases in activity over the time period using the social media analytics tool you’ve been using. Consider the possible explanations for the sudden spike in your social media following on a given day. If someone brought up your profile, did it because of your hilarious and interesting post, or did it happen by chance?

Analyze the level of happiness your clients experience

Measuring happiness is like trying to gauge affection or wrath; it’s not simple to do. Yet, there are several indications that might at least give you a feel for the growth, stability, or decline in satisfaction among your followers. If you’re providing excellent service, your clients should have a favourable impression of you. Gauge how happy your customers are by keeping an eye on these indicators.

This measure is designed to display the rate at which profile administrators respond to messages sent by their fans. In order to ensure that the needs of your clients are met, you should aim to increase this metric as much as possible.
If the response time can be reduced to zero, that would be ideal. The majority of social media users (42%) say they anticipate a response time of less than an hour. Remember this, and make it a goal to respond quickly on social media. If you find during your performance review that your customer service staff is struggling to fulfil demands, you may want to consider hiring more people, instituting a shift system, or even using a chatbot to help out.
Follower loyalty may be measured by observing the growth or decline of your social media following over the course of specified time intervals. Don’t only try to attract new followers; show your current ones some love, too.