Shubham Rajpara
Shubham is an aspiring clinical psychologist, who also happens to be a blogger for corporates and startups.
When it comes to a social media marketing or any other vertical of marketing, for that matter, shooting in the dark is never an option.
It generally happens that businesses tend to forget to keep an eye on the data their social media campaigns and engagement activities offer. This is because social media metrics are not looked at with an analytical eye.
The best practice is to identify the KPIs and keep track of them to make informed data-driven decisions.
Impact of tracking on future social media marketing plan
These are the following reasons why you need to keep an eye on the KPIs of all social media activities:
- Better understanding your target audience and what they feel about your brand
- Getting precious insights to repurpose social media marketing endeavor
- Having leverage over other competitors who aren't tracking analytics
Now, let's look at the social media analytics that you should keep an eye on.
The seven overlooked social media metrics you should track now.
For any brand or business to get its social media marketing right, you have to track an elaborate list of metrics. Here's a very comprehensive list for you by Buffer.
In this blog, we will only discuss those metrics that are very important, easy to track, yet the most overlooked ones.
Here are the 7 most useful KPIs you should track to yield great results (if they aren't overlooked):
Table of Contents
1. Trending Hashtags
Hashtags are not a way to format your social media captions. They are the most comfortable. and most effective tools to know what topics are trending now.
A quick and straightforward hashtag search on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter will give you the list of all the posts that have used a similar hashtag. This is one way how hashtags manually help people search for information regarding a particular topic.
Another way is using relevant hashtags that will allow social media algorithms to boost your posts organically.
Take, for instance, if you make a post for Black Friday and tag it with relevant and trending hashtags like #blackfriday and #blackfridaysale will help you get increased impressions and engagement, for two reasons:
- People are going to search for Black Friday related posts on social media, for sales deals, discount coupons, and other incentives.
- The algorithm will pick up your post in general since the hashtags will be trending during Black Friday.
Here are some quick and easy tools to help you find the trending hashtags you can use to boost your post:
You can also manually search for a hashtag and see the number of posts made with it and the engagement they bring in terms of likes and comments to gauge their potency.
Does this mean you can piggyback on all trending hashtags?
Absolutely no!
The reasons for that are:
- Negative branding -- people can see how you are stuffing trending keywords that are irrelevant to your posts to promote your business.
- Social media algorithms can detect spammy hashtags. For instance, Instagram has now cut the organic reach of posts where hashtags are used in a spammy manner.
So, make sure you use the right and relevant hashtags for the related products and services.
2. Sentiment Analysis
The most vital metric for any brand is to know how people feel about them. What is their sentiment towards their products and services? Social media is a platform that allows for hyper in-personal communication between the business and the people.
A subset of social listening, Sentiment Analysis helps businesses empirically gauge people's feelings towards their brand, which can then be transmuted into actionable data.
Social media sentiment analysis takes the conversations your customers make around the social space and puts them into context.
Here's how Sprout Social gives you insights:
It does this tracking negative, positive, and neutral words in mentions and comments. Sentiment analysis uses Machine Learning to dig into the positive, negative, and neutral emotions surrounding those mentions.
Machine Learning powered Sentiment Analysis Tools can do this for you. Here are some of the useful ones:
With these tools, when a user's activity is positive, you can reward them for spreading the right word. And, when it's negative, you can instantly bring in your customer service reps to handle the issue, ensuring that a wildfire of negative emotions is not caused on social media about your brand.
3. Audience Growth rate
The Audience Growth rate is the most basic yet the most critical metric.
The audience growth rate can be defined as the change in the audience size on a social network. That is to say, it is the rate of decrease in the total number of your followers and fans after activity on social media activity.
Thus, by monitoring this KPI, you can see how well a post has performed or an entire marketing campaign.
With this data analysis, you will be able to get insights that will allow you to repurpose your social media strategies and make data-driven, informed decisions for the next campaign.
Here's how you calculate audience growth rate:
STEP 1: Measure your new followers gained after a social media activity over a period of time.
STEP 2: Divide these new followers by the total no. of audience
STEP 3: Now, multiply by 100 to get the audience growth rate in percentage.
4. Influence
Now, having mentioned that the number of fans and followers matters, it is also true that the quality of these numbers matters more than the quantity.
What matters immensely is who is talking to about your brand.
It is highly beneficial to have an influential person with a considerable audience, a good reputation of having knowledge about your industry, and speaking about your product and service.
To find the right influencers for your campaigns, you can use tools like:
These tools assign an "influence score" to help you gauge their potency to influence others and thereby benefiting you.
Another similar kind of metric to keep an eye is the "kinetic influencer." These influencers are the ones setting things in motion. They are participating the most in engaging with and sharing your posts, thereby driving much traffic. These are your true brand advocates, they might not have a vast audience, but their ingenuity will significantly impact your business.
5. Share of Voice
This metric is used to help you understand where you stand amongst your competitors. This industry-specific metric helps a business gauge its brand receptivity by the customers and its dominance in the market.
Having a better share of voice means a business has more brand authority over others. This directly increases traffic and conversion rates, as people would only go for the most liked and most-popular business.
Here's how you can measure your share of voice:
Step 1: Simply pick up a metric you want to measure. Find the values of that metric for your business
Step 2: Find the overall value of that metric in the industry.
Step 3: Divide your value by the market value and multiply by 100.
For example, consider measuring SOV for branded hashtags.
If your branded hashtags appear 40 times compared to 50 times for the whole market, you have 60% of SOV, establishing yourself as the leader in your field.
6. Bounce Rate
The importance of measuring the bounce rate as a metric for your website or marketing materials can never be understated. When you review the bounce rate, you can know what you can do to improve your website's "stickiness." The longer a visitor sticks on your website or other marketing material, the better it is for SEO and conversion.
You can easily see the bounce rates on your posts through Google Analytics like this:
As defined by Google Analytics, Bounce Rate is the percentage of bounced visits (i.e., the average number of people who landed on your page but bounced off without spending a certain amount of time). Bounce Rate gives you the idea of the quality of your landing pages and other marketing collateral. High Bounce Rate depicts that your landing pages aren't relevant and useful to your visitors.
The bounce rate varies from industry to even pages. Here is what a reasonable bounce rate should be in 2020, according to Custom Media Labs:
- For retail sites, the bounce rate is usually between 20% - 40%
- For a simple landing page, the bounce rate is between 70% - 90%
- For dictionaries, portals, blogs, and news/event sites it is between 65% - 90%
- For a web-portal, the bounce rate is between 10% - 30%
- For self-service and FAQ type sites, the bounce rate is between 10% - 30%
- For non-e-commerce content sites, the bounce rate is generally between 40 - 60%
- For lead generation sites, the bounce rate is between 30 - 50%
7. Amplification & Engagement
While speaking of social media metrics, Amplification, and Engagement are the most natural metrics to keep track of and the most overlooked.
These metrics can help businesses answer questions like:
- How indulged are people in the online conversation about your product or service?
- What kind of posts strikes the most engagement like likes, comments, and shares?
In almost all social media platforms, content is both shared and retweeted and liked and commented on. The number of shares measures amplification while engagement is measured by the numbers of likes, replies, and comments.
Amplification:
Facebook shares and Twitter retweets are helpful to know how important and valuable people find your content to share it with their connections. This sharing causes an exponential amplification in your reachability, impressions, and conversions.
Engagement:
Engagements like comments, replies, and likes help you see how your audience is engaging with your content. This depicts how important your business is to people. And whether your social media activities can open up conversations or not.
The best practice is to look at all these metrics together and aim for a higher number.
Conclusion
Social Media platforms are a direct doorway to your customers. Here you get a wealth of real-time insights as to how people perceive your brand. Only by analyzing crucial social media metrics can you transmute these insights into actionable, result-yielding data to repurpose social media marketing campaigns and gain huge revenues.
