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social media kpis

Social Media KPIs: What You Should Be Monitoring

How can you tell if your social media strategy is helping to drive engagement and build your business’s online presence? At Elevation Marketing, we value transparency, and we feel it is integral to provide regular reporting to all of our clients. These reports describe how well our marketing strategy is performing as well as areas of opportunity. If you find yourself confused when it comes to Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) you’re not alone. 

To help you better understand the performance of your marketing strategy (and the marketing agency you’ve partnered with), we’ve put together a series of blog posts on the various KPIs typically used to monitor the impact of a digital marketing strategy. Today, we’re taking a look at social media KPIs and revealing which are the most important metrics to monitor throughout your social media marketing efforts. Without further ado, let’s dive in. 

Community Growth

In the most basic sense, the most straightforward of all important social media KPIs is the number of followers you’ve accrued. Because social media is all about putting your brand in front of a broader audience, you want to see your number of followers increase over time. 

The more value you add through your social media posts, the more followers you’re likely to accumulate with each of your social accounts. Generally, this is done by frequently posting content that your followers are likely to find value in and, ideally, share with their friends and acquaintances.

As mentioned, you ideally want your number of followers to increase over time. If your audience has stagnated, or if you’ve lost followers recently, it’s important to pinpoint why this may have happened and take steps to prevent further lost followers.

Engagement Score

Having followers is great! But it’s even better if those followers are regularly engaging with each other and with your brand on social media. Engagement indicates that your followers are comfortable with your brand. It also helps to build a sense of community among your followers, which can develop trust and even encourage them to share your content with others.

An engagement score is a quantitative metric used to evaluate your brand engagement across your social accounts. It factors in how many likes, comments, shares, and other forms of engagement your brand sees in a given month.

Keep track of your engagement score as well as how it changes from month to month. If it’s gone up, find out how your activity has differed in the last month and try to build on that momentum. If your engagement score has dipped, evaluate how your social activity. How responsive have you been? Have you encouraged interaction through your messaging? What steps can you take to attract more engagement? By evaluating your engagement regularly, you will have a pulse on the effectiveness of your social efforts and how your online followers are responding to your brand messaging. 

Number of Posts

It’s important to post regularly on your social channels to maintain awareness of your brand and continually provide value to your audience. This means that the number of posts you’re publishing on your various social channels is an important KPI to track.

If the number of posts you’ve published has increased or decreased from month to month, it may be worth noting why and examining how the increase or decrease in frequency may have impacted other important social media KPIs.

Keep in mind that a decrease in the number of social media posts you’ve made isn’t necessarily bad. Sometimes there’s simply less to post about in a given month. It’s important that each post provides something of value to your audience—and posting more purely for the sake of posting is liable to backfire and chase followers away.

Strongest Posts

Your strongest posts represent one of the most valuable social media KPIs to track. Take stock of your highest performing social media posts, as these can provide valuable information as to how to best engage with your audience moving forward.

You can use several metrics to determine which posts were your strongest over the past month. Overall engagement, new followers and likes, and most shares are all excellent benchmarks to use for identifying your brand’s best posts. 

Once you’ve identified your strongest performers, you can try to identify themes and commonalities that can be incorporated into future posts.

Weakest Posts

Knowing what not to do can be just as valuable as playing to your strengths. As you set about identifying your strongest social media posts, take stock of your weakest posts as well. You can use the same metrics as before to identify your weakest posts from the past month. 

As with the strongest posts, try to identify themes among the posts that drove the least engagement and shares. Moving forward, steer away from similar messaging in order to maximize engagement across your social media accounts.

It can be painful to see posts that performed poorly, but building a following on social media is tricky—mistakes are inevitable. The key is to learn from these posts and do better in the future!

Follow the Elevation Marketing Blog for More Tips on Social Media Strategies!

Building an audience for your brand on social media can be difficult. What works for one audience might flop for another, and often the only way to find out what works is through trial and error. By tracking the social media KPIs we’ve discussed today, however, you’ll be better equipped to understand how effective your social media marketing efforts have been and plan your strategy moving forward! If you’re working with an agency or marketing consultant, be sure to ask for these KPI’s to be included in your reporting and review them monthly. This will give you a quick but efficient look into the health of your social media program. 

For more digital marketing and social media tips, be sure to subscribe to our blog and follow us on our social channels: Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. And don’t forget to stay tuned as we continue our series on marketing KPIs with a comprehensive SEO KPI rundown!

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