With nearly half of the world’s population using social media, more businesses turn to the platforms to connect with their customers. No wonder so many professionals place social media in the heart of their marketing strategies as it allows brands to communicate with their customers, forming stronger relationships and brand identity. 

However, when starting their social media efforts, many businesses get stuck because they fail to consider the following question. How do you know your social media strategy is working? 

The best answer is by tracking the key performance indicators (KPIs). Not particularly sure where to begin with monitoring KPIs? 

This article is a perfect start. To help you make sense of social media KPIs, we’ve gathered a list of the top seven things you should keep in mind when tracking your social media performance. Also, you’ll find useful formulas you can apply to measure the performance of your campaigns. 

1. Followers 

This is one of the most fundamental social media KPIs that indicates the number of people following your brand on each of the social media platforms. Monitoring the number of followers will help you identify your potential reach and craft your social media strategy accordingly.  

If you want to identify the growth tendencies of your followers, use this formula to calculate the audience growth rate. 

Growth Rate (%) = The Number of New Followers ÷ The Number of Total Followers × 100

2.     Active followers 

Besides monitoring the overall amount of followers, you want to keep track of your active followers specifically. 

What is the difference between regular followers and active followers? An active follower is considered to be a user who has logged in to their account and interacted with your social media content within the last 30 days. 

Monitoring active followers is a great way to measure how many users are actually engaging with your content. As a bonus, you can use active follower data to identify the percentage of inactive or fake accounts. This means that you can remove any irrelevant spam accounts to declutter your comments.

3.     Traffic 

Do you know what percentage of your overall web traffic comes from social media? Monitoring the amount of traffic driven to your website from social media is essential to increase conversions. 

By understanding what types of content drive social media users to visit your website, you can better engage them to convert more and convert faster. 

Let’s say your followers clicked a specific call-to-action within your post that took them to the landing page of your small business website. This means that a conversion took place. 

If you want to identify the percentage of followers who took a specific action (a.k.a. converted), use this formula to calculate the conversion rate.  

Conversion Rate (%) = The Number of Users Who Completed the Desired Action ÷ The Number of Clicks × 100

4.     Impressions 

Keeping track of social media impressions will help you indicate how many times your posts appeared on a timeline or newsfeed. Monitoring impressions is important because it gives you a perspective of how many people could potentially see your post.

Tracking user impressions can be tricky as one user can have multiple impressions. Let me explain how. Let’s say your follower first sees your post within their own feed, and then again and again when someone they follow share it in their stories or repost it. This means that a single follower can have multiple impressions. 

If you want to measure how much it costs you to get customer impressions, use this formula to calculate cost per thousand impressions (CPM).

Cost Per 1,000 Impressions = Sponsored Ad Spent ÷ The Number of Impressions × 100

5.     Likes

Likes are a natural way to generate engagement on your social media platforms. Because users usually gravitate towards what’s popular, the more likes your post has, the higher engagement it will cultivate. Additionally, many likes signal to the social media algorithms that the posts are popular and deserve a higher position in search results. 

If you want to find out the percentage of people who like your posts relative to the total number of followers, use this formula to calculate theapplause rate percentage.

Applause Rate Percentage = Number of Likes ÷ The Total Number of Followers × 100

6.     Shares

Likes are great for measuring engagement, but shares indicate that users decide to complete a more conscious decision. When users choose to share your social media content, they offer a personal recommendation to their own audiences. That’s why if your data shows that your content gets a lot of shares, it’s usually a great performance indicator.  

7.     Comments 

Comments are another engagement indicator that shows your followers’ interest in your content. When users are commenting on your posts, it means that they’re eager to engage in a conversation with your brand, have questions, or wish to express their opinion. 

If you want to measure your social media engagement, use this formula to calculate the average engagement rate for each of your platforms. 

Avg. Engagement Rate (%) = The Number of Likes + The Number of Comments + The Number of Shares ÷ The Total Number of Followers × 100

Final thoughts 

If you want to bring your social media strategy to success, keeping track of these KPIs is the first step. By monitoring the performance data, you can make clever, informed, and strategic choices on how to improve your future campaigns. 

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