16 Social Media Metrics for Marketers in 2019

Billions of people across the globe have access to social media and it is one of the most powerful marketing tools for businesses. Social media offers an effective channel to directly connect and engage with your audience. It has proven a vital tool for businesses to reach customer, increase revenue, and generate better ROI.

However, a social media marketing campaign itself does not guarantee its success. Marketers must track the right social media KPIs to measure the campaign performance and to make necessary the adjustments in the next iteration. Your social media metrics should always tied to your business goals.

Social Media Marketing Objectives:

1. Expand Customer Awareness

2. Generate Marketing Qualified Leads

3. Drive Sales

4. Foster Customer Loyalty

Expand Customer Awareness

Your social media can grow customer awareness either organically or via paid advertisements. The key metrics that measures customer awareness are the following:

1. Total Impressions: This measures how many times your content or messages have been shown to. Your total impression is likely proportional to the amount spent in paid advertising and not accurately reflect your campaign effectiveness. The metric should be used as a ratio to the other metrics below.

1. Reach: This measures the unique number of people that have seen your content. The larger your reach, the greater potential benefits that might bring to your business.

3. Likes: The likes is important in a sense that it creates preferential attachment through social proof. Once a content hits a threshold in likes, it gets amplified with more views, more attention, and more shares. The metric also offers insights in gauging the quality and effectiveness of your content.

4. Shares and Mentions: Social media is powerful with a wide reach of audience due to its network effect. When a content is shared and mentioned, it likely drives up the content’s total impression, reach, and likes. Depending on this metric performance, you can assess your content quality and identify key influencers to improve your campaign performance.

Generate Marketing Qualified Leads

Marketing qualified leads are the potential customers that you have reacted positively to your social media campaign. The reactions can be in the form of shares, likes, comments, and clicks. The key metrics that measures for lead generation are the following:

1. Click-Through-Rate: This measures the number of clicks on your content. The clicks reflect a group of self-selected targeted audience who are interested in learning more about your business or relevant topics. This self selection process is an effective qualifying criteria for lead generation. A low click-through-rate also indicates issues within the social media campaign and should be evaluated for better performance.

2. Referral Traffic or Landing Page Views: This metric measures the source of your landing page traffics to shed lights on the effectiveness of your social media campaign. You likely have different marketing channels that leads to the same landing page, and it’s important to know exactly how much traffic was generated by your social media campaign.

3. Bounce Rate: Bounce rate refers to the traffic that leaves immediately after arriving your website. By measuring the bounce rate from your social media traffic, you can assess whether your landing page content adequately aligns with what you promised in the social media content. One caveat is that sometimes traffic bounce simply due to clicking on the links by mistake.

4. Comments: Comments on your social media content offers the context and signal on whether a person is a likely lead. When people take time to write comments, they are emotionally engaged in your content and should be evaluated and handled accordingly.

5. New Visitors: You should also measures the % of new web visits from your social media campaign, showing you whether your content is bringing in new leads or simply redirecting the same old visitors.

Drive Sales

Your social media campaign ultimately serves as an engine for the top of your sales funnel. The key social media metrics relevant to sales are the following:

1. Content Engagement Rate: This measures the level of content engagement from your audience. When you have a diverse range of topics relevant to your business, this metrics sheds lights on your targeted audience’s preferences, problems, and desires. This information can greatly help your marketing messages, sales pitches, and product feature developments.

2. Conversion Rate or Win Rate: This refers to the percentage of social media traffic that converts to a demo, trial or customer. The higher the conversion rate, the higher the impact on eventual sales.

3. Cost Per Conversion: This refers to the average cost of your social media campaign per successful conversion. This is important because it measures whether or not social media is a viable and sustainable strategy to obtain customers at a reasonable cost.

Foster Customer Loyalty

Social media is also a great channel to engage with your existing customers, keeping them up-to-date on relevant news and driving sales through referrals and testimonials. The key metrics to measure customer loyalty are the following:

1. Active Followers: Active followers are a subset of your followers who actively engage in your content and share their opinions about you. It’s important for all businesses to manage their active followers accordingly because social media can propagate both the good and bad narratives easily though network effect. When managed properly, you can grow your customer loyalty in social media and amplify your reach and reputation.

2. Sentiment: As mentioned earlier, social media amplifies both the good and bad of your business. This also applies to your customer sentiment voiced in the social media. It’s important to have a handle on the positives and negatives reviews of your business in social media.

3. Response Rate: This measures how quickly does your business respond to your customers’ inquiries, complaints, and/or compliments. A consistent slow in response rate can negatively impact your customer loyalty and brand.

4. Message Volume: The message volume reflects relevancy. If your business have low message volume, it is difficult to stay relevant within the channel.

Wrap Up

Social Media marketing is perhaps one of the most important marketing strategies of today’s business world. Marketers need to measure and track the above metrics to remain competitive and relevant.