Let’s face it! When it comes to social media metrics, it’s confusing and overwhelming. Every week there seems to be a new metric created. Luckily, your social media goals will help determine which metrics are most important to you and your business. For every goal you create, you need a related metric so you know if your social strategy is actually working. That’s why they’re often referred to as Key Performance Indicators or KPI’s. They indicate and measure the performance of your strategy. 

But, when it comes down to the nitty-gritty, there are basic metrics you should always keep in mind. This way you can focus on the metrics that matter most when determining how successful your campaigns are and how well your social media strategy is performing. Ultimately, you want to be able to use these metrics to prove the impact your social media strategy has had on your overall business. Because, remember – social media is just one part of your marketing strategy. 

Key Performance Indicators

Measuring the right social media metrics is a science and tools like Twitter Analytics or Facebook Insights will help you dive into your data. Free tools like these or paid solutions can help you consistently track your performance. But in a sea of metrics, which ones are most important? We broke it down to 5 must-have categories:

Awareness: Number of followers, reach, and impressions

If your goals are brand awareness or how people perceive your brand, these are important metrics to follow. 

The number of followers you have is a vanity metric. Although it’s important, you may also have a large number of followers with no engagement or reach. Take a deeper dive into your impressions and reach to see if your content is successful. Impressions are how many times your post shows up in someone’s timeline. While reach is the number of unique viewers your post could have. 

To really understand how well your content is performing, you will want to take into account engagement. For example, your post could have high impressions, but a low engagement number – meaning your post wasn’t interesting enough for your audience to take action. 

Engagement: Clicks, likes, shares, and comments

Engagement will monitor how connected your audience is with your content and the effectiveness of it. An engaged audience will interact with your business through clicks, likes, shares, or comments.

The higher the engagement rate, the more responsive your audience is to your content types. Engagement can be broken down into:

• Likes, shares, comments, and etc.: These are individual engagement metrics.
• Post engagement metric: The number of engagements divided by impression or reach. A high rate means people who see the post find it interesting enough to like, share, or comment.
• Account mentions: These can indicate good brand awareness, especially if they are mentions that aren’t part of a reply.

Share of voice: Volume and sentiment

Share of voice will show how many people are talking about your business compared to your competitors. This is often an ongoing goal, because you’ll always want to be on top of how well your business is doing against your competitors.

ROI: Referrals and conversions

If you are a business that offers a product or service to consumers, this is an important metric to follow. 

Referrals are how someone lands on your website. Often in your tools, they will be broken down by sources. Conversions are when someone actually purchases something from your website. 

When looking at your referrals and conversions, you will also take into consideration your click-through rate (CTR) in your ads and posts. The higher the CTR, the more effective your ad or post is. You can monitor your CTR in your emails, paid advertisements, landing page links, social media, website buttons, and any other call-to-action buttons. Hand in hand with CTRs is the bounce rate. That is the percentage of visitors who click on a link in your posts, or ads, or emails, only to quickly leave the page without taking action. Take a look at these metrics to better understand how well your content is performing.

Customer care: Response rate and time

Last but not least is the customer’s experience with your business. 

Response rate and time monitors how quickly your team responds to messages and how many they respond to. You’ll want to make sure that your customers are being replied to in a timely manner. It’ll help with your overall customer satisfaction and conversions.

This is just an overview of the essential metrics that matter for most businesses. A combination of these will provide you with the visibility you need of your social media performance and most importantly, of the impact to your bottom-line. Because at the heart of great marketing is the data to back it up.

Today, as more businesses are joining social media, the real question many are asking is how do I gain more followers organically? Not just any followers – real followers who aren’t bots, who love your brand and are looking to engage. There are a number of ways you can boost your presence. Let’s take a look at our 25 methods you can use to grow your following authentically so you can help improve brand awareness and drive valuable traffic and conversions.

Set S.M.A.R.T. goals

These are the reasons you’re on social media. They’re Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Timely. By assigning each post to a goal, you can avoid posting for the sake of posting. Your followers will appreciate it.

Understand your audience and speak to them

Spend time thinking about who your audience is. It isn’t everyone, so you’ll have to narrow it down to a defined target audience. Once you put in the work, you’ll be able to create valuable content that speaks to your audience and attracts more followers.

Be human

Don’t be afraid to have a personality. In this day and age, people have come to expect to get to know their favorite brands on a personal level. So whether you’re cracking jokes, talking to your followers like friends, or showing off your human side by featuring your team, getting personal will allow your audience to form a better connection.

Build Relationships

The number of followers you have doesn’t matter if they’re not engaging with your content. It’s worthless if you have a million followers who don’t connect with you. It’s better to have followers who engage your content. You may be asking yourself, how is this done though? By building relationships with your audience. Here’s some tips:

• Always @mention people you reference
• Answer questions and complaints immediately
• Reply to people who @mention you or share your content
• Don’t just re-share content – take the time to start a conversation.

Create a Social Media Content Calendar

Being organized when it comes to developing your social media strategy will help you in the long run. Not only will it allow you to fine-tune each of your posts without having to jump from site to site, but will also guide you in timing your posts to maximize your reach.

Automate the right way

Be smart when you choose to automate your social media. You can automate scheduling or curating content, but avoid it when dealing with your followers. With customer care being a huge part of social media, it’s important to make sure that it’s personalized and not automated – it can lead to higher customer satisfaction and sales.

Focus on helping over selling

If your followers ask questions, reply immediately. Be helpful in your content. Once you build a relationship with your audience, you can start social selling (but not all the time because that can turn into a nuisance).

Optimize for engagement

You can start by taking a look at your profiles for any missing pieces. It can be as simple as imagery or adding keywords to your profile. Then you’ll want to optimize your content by using hashtags and keywords that can increase engagement. Take some time to follow accounts and connect with them to increase your exposure.

Get visual

You can’t go wrong with posting photo and video content. In fact, live videos on Facebook get 6 times the engagement versus any other type of content. You don’t need a huge budget for this either! Consider using team photos or videos, customer photos, event photos, behind-the-scenes photos and videos, quote photos, or infographics.

Stay active

Don’t let your social feeds go inactive. Try to find new ways to create fresh content day after day, weekly at a minimum. It’s actually easier than it sounds. Try using social scheduling and automation to save you time and money. Prioritize your networks based on your audience. Repurpose your content so you don’t always have to create new content.

Don’t be afraid to pay

Experimenting with ads can have a huge impact on your ROI. Even though a lot can be done organically, new updates to algorithms on social media signal a need for businesses to think about paid media.

Use trends and hashtags when appropriate

Be smart when it comes to which trends you’ll be piggybacking on – you’ll want to steer clear of controversial topics so you don’t isolate your audience. Also, since these trends are often time-sensitive, you’ll need to be quick to maximize your opportunity for engagement.

Use the right tools to measure your success

You don’t want to guess how you’re doing on social media. There are tons of tools available to you so you can truly understand how you’re performing. Tools like Google Analytics will break down your top-performing content, trends, and your presence by the numbers so social media becomes more of a science.

Create content people want

Be original if you want to stand out from the crowd. Create content that gets your audience to stop scrolling. With all the noise on social media, what does your audience want to see – that’ll help you break through it. If you have trouble creating content, just answer the questions your audience is asking.

Engage your audience

Whether it’s just a simple like, or a reply to a comment, your audience wants to know someone human is on the other end. Connect with them and it’s more than likely they’ll begin to connect with you.

Promote your profile everywhere

There’s no point in creating social media profiles if you’re not going to promote them. Put follow buttons on your website so you’re not wasting the traffic you get from your ads.

Follow relevant industry thought leaders and influencers

Engage with them so you can grow your visibility. Share their content and many of these influencers and thought leaders may follow you back – improving your credibility as a business.

Fully complete your profile

Your profile is the first impression when it comes to social media. Create a great one. Fill in every single field and use relevant keywords that can help drive traffic to your profiles.

Be consistent across the board

Your overall tone and messaging should be consistent across all social media platforms. Make sure your content matches your established personality, mission, and voice. Your audience wants to build a relationship with you, and if you aren’t authentic it can confuse your followers and motivate them to unfollow.

Add social icons to your emails

Incorporate social icons into your emails since you may already have an engaged audience there.

Provide benefits to your audience

People love free offers. Freebies can increase your following while also engaging your audience. They may be more willing to spread the word about your business if there’s a free offer to share.

Go above and beyond with customer service

Don’t be robotic when speaking to your customers. It’s probably not a great idea to have automated replies to complaints. Machine-like responses like “Email us with any questions” can annoy people when they’re already unhappy. Instead, take the time to reply to these in a personalized way.

Link to your website

Make it easy for your audience to find out more about your business by linking directly to your website. It’ll also increase web traffic.

Conduct events

One great way to spread awareness about your business is through events. You can even create your own hashtags and incorporate them into your signage and marketing collateral. This will help grab the attention of your audience at these events.

Treat each platform as its own

Each platform you’re on should be treated individually so you can optimize your content and grow your audience. Don’t make the mistake of posting the same content on all your networks at the same time – your followers could be following you on every channel. Instead, understand your audience and the platforms to optimize your content in different ways.

There’s no formula to going viral on social media. The best rule of thumb is to be helpful and post relevant content your audience wants. When you truly engage and connect with your audience, your followers will organically grow with your business.

The key to success when it comes to social media is having a strategy. Without a strategy and understanding your goals and your audience, it’ll be difficult to get the results you want. Whether you’re a seasoned social media pro or you’re starting from square one, developing a social media marketing strategy can be overwhelming. But, it doesn’t have to be. Here’s an eight-step guide on how to create a plan that works for you and your business.

Set S.M.A.R.T. goals

Creating a successful strategy starts with defining your goals. Without them, you have no way to measure your success and ROI. 

Your goals should be:

• Specific: Be clear. It’ll help you measure your success and progress.
• Measurable: Each of your goals should be measurable.
• Attainable: Even though you may believe the sky's the limit, you’ll need to set goals that are within reach with hard work.
• Relevant: Your goals will need to tie back to your business goals.
• Timely: Deadlines make people accountable.

An example of a S.M.A.R.T. goal could look like this: On Twitter, you’ll post GIFs 2 times a week that communicate your company culture. Your target is an average of at least 200 likes and 10 retweets, and ultimately to boost engagement by 10% in 3 months time.

Determine Your Most Important Metrics

How are you going to determine that your efforts are successful? Look beyond vanity metrics. Even though it’s nice to see your follower count grow, it’s much more important to track things like engagement, click-through rates, and conversions. Other metrics that may influence your bottom line can include time spent on your website, reach, brand mentions, sentiment, and total shares.

Define Your Audience

Knowing your audience and what they want to see is going to be key to your strategy. That way you can transform your followers into life-long customers with valuable content that addresses their pain points and needs.

You will want to be as specific as possible because it’ll help you with creating an audience that is likely to engage with you and your business. Determine your highly focused buyer persona by looking at the following: 

• Age
• Location
• Job Title
• Income
• Interests
• Pain Points That You Can Solve
• Most Used Social Networks (This will help you define what channels you will be using)

In creating your audience and buyer personas, don’t make assumptions. Use data and your social media analytics to dive deep into your followers. 

Know Your Competitors

Understanding how your competitors already use social media can take a lot of the guesswork out of your strategy. Do a competitive analysis to better understand who your competitors are and what works for them (platforms, types of media, voice and tone, and messages). By analyzing your competitive market, you’ll get an idea of what opportunities are available to you. For example, if your competitor is dominant on Facebook, you can focus on Twitter or Instagram to market to an under-served audience.

If you use a social media tool, you can set up social listening streams to keep an eye on your competitors. You may notice shifts in the way sites are used, or you might see a post that gets a ton of engagement. This information can help guide you in developing your strategy.

You may even find some inspiration while you do your analysis. It’s important to stand out from the crowd, but you can always take a little inspiration from businesses that are doing great on social media.

Conduct a Social Media Audit

If you’re already on social media, take a look at what you’re currently doing. You’ll want to take into account:

• What platforms you’re using
• What’s working and what is not
• What type of media you’re using
• What sites are bringing you value
• Who is engaging with you
• How do you compare with your competitors

Your audit should give you a clear picture of the goal of each platform. If it’s not clear, you’ll have to see if your audience is there, how they’re using the platform, and if the site can be used to achieve your goals.

Set Up Your Profiles

This is the time to fine tune which sites you’ll want to use. Once you have decided which networks you’ll focus on, create your profiles. Be consistent with your branding across all your channels so it is easily recognizable.

Create a Social Media Content Calendar

Creating engaging, valuable content is vital to the success of your social media marketing. By creating a content calendar, you have a visual representation of when posts will go live on which network. This will help you plan the types of content out throughout the week, month or year. When creating your calendar, take into account the time you will be spending on engaging content (besides your moments of spontaneous engagement of course).

Here are some examples of content that can help you be successful:

• Images 
• Videos
• Blogs
• Company News
• Infographics
• Interviews

The list could go on forever, but you’ll need to make sure your content aligns with your business. You may also want to experiment with paid promotion to hyper-target your audience on all networks. 

Measure and Adjust

Even the best social media managers rely on trial and error to optimize their content. Track your metrics, analyze your data, and then adjust your strategy so you can optimize. A fantastic social media strategy isn’t set in stone, and is always a work in progress.

Developing your strategy may be one of the most difficult things you will do when setting up your social media. Take a look at the big picture and shift your focus from the small day-to-day tasks, so you aren’t posting content for the sake of posting. It will help you achieve your marketing and business goals.