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Your Ultimate Social Media KPIs Cheat Sheet: Top 20 KPIs  

Social Media Marketing
Mamta May 17, 2024

If you check the latest statistics, you’ll find that more than 4.95 billion people are now using social media! To put things in context: that’s more than half of the global population.  

Now, with such vast usage, it is only logical that your brand has an active social media presence. (and follows all the latest trends!) 

Social media can help you generate sales, increase brand awareness, and conduct market research. However, it is only possible if you have a set of social media KPIs that will help you dictate the overall growth.  

In this blog, I will discuss the top 20 social media marketing KPIs you need to know about!  

What are Key Performance Indicators for Social Media?  

Social media KPIs are metrics or data pointers that help determine the overall performance of a brand’s social media marketing strategy.  

In other words, you can say that KPIs on social media are like a scorecard for you to judge the effectiveness of the content approach.  

KPIs in general aren’t limited to social media! You can have key performance indicators for any marketing channel and know if you are meeting your predefined business goals or not.  

Why is it Important to Track social media KPIs?  

Imagine working on social media relentlessly and still be completely clueless about the results. Quite a bummer, isn’t it?  

That’s where social media KPIs jump to your rescue.  

Here are a few benefits of tracking key performance indicators that you can’t ignore:  

  • Check the progress of your goals: Know if the current strategies are leading you towards the initially set goals or not.  
  • Make data-driven decisions: Use the KPIs to spot any growth opportunities and make appropriate changes accordingly. You can also find any specific success patterns and repeat them in the future.
  • Benchmark against competitors: Compare your social media metrics with those of your competitors and see if the accounts are performing well or not. See where you’re leading and use that to your business’s advantage.  

How to Set KPIs for social media?  

Key performance indicators for social media are plenty! But keeping track of all of them can be overwhelming. As such, you need to be SMART and pick the ones that best fit your long-term goals.  

S – try to be as SPECIFIC as you can 
M – keep the KPIs MEASURABLE & easily accessible 
A – be realistic and set ATTAINABLE goals 
R – ensure that you pick KPIs RELEVANT for your business 
T – set a TIME frame to meet the goals 

Social Media KPIs You Need to Track  

Generally, social media KPIs are segregated into several categories:  

  • Visibility  
  • Engagement  
  • Conversion 
  • Customer Satisfaction 
  • Community Growth 

Visibility KPIs  

As a social media marketer, one of your main goals is to spread brand awareness online.  

Here are some social media marketing KPIs that you need to track for visibility.  

Reach  

Reach tells you the unique number of people who saw your post online. This metric depends on how well the audience is resonating with your content.  

Impressions 

Impressions measure the number of times your post was pushed to user feeds by the algorithm. However, you can’t know if someone actually saw your post or not.  

Audience growth rate  

Audience growth rate can help you determine how quickly your audience base is growing in a specific time period.  

Growth Rate = (New followers / Total Audience) x 100  

Engagement KPIs  

Engagement metrics are essential to know if the audience is interacting with the content or not.  

Engagement KPIs are as follows:  

Reactions 

Total number of people who engaged with your post by pressing the reaction button. This can vary based on the social media platform in consideration.  

For example: Facebook has several reactions including like, haha, sad, angry. On the other hand, Instagram only offers the classic heart reaction.  

Facebook reaction

Comments  

Total number of times users commented on your post.  

These comments can either carry a positive or negative sentiment. As such, more comments won’t always indicate brand growth.  

Shares 

Count of people sharing your post on their social media feed so that it can be seen by their friends or followers. (For 𝕏 (formerly Twitter), a Repost counts as one share.)  

Shares can help amplify your brand voice.   

Saves 

Total number of times your post has been saved or bookmarked by the user to view it again in the future.  

If you’re getting more saves, that means the audience is finding the content informational and valuable.  

Clicks  

Whenever you add a clickable link (to another social media page, website, landing page, e-commerce store, etc.) in your social media post, you also need to keep track of total number of clicks received.  

If you’re not getting any clicks, it is time to change your Call-to-Action content.  

Mentions  

Number of times your brand’s account has been tagged by other people in their posts, stories, or comments.  

Getting mentioned is a great way for someone to showcase their vote of confidence.  

PS: For Instagram, ensure that your mentions are not disabled.  

Instagram mentions settings

Conversion KPIs  

Till now, we discussed the metrics that will reflect if your social media strategy is bringing awareness and popularity to your brand or not.  

Now, let’s jump to social media marketing KPIs that will tell if the way you’re using social media for business is effective in increasing ROI or not.  

Conversion rate  

Total number of users who do what you want them to! For example: if your social media CTA wants to direct users to your website, the conversion rate will depict the count of people who completed the required action.  

Conversion rate percentage = (Conversions / Total clicks) x 100  

Click-through Rate (CTR) 

CTR tells you the percentage of people clicking on the link in the social media post as compared to the total number of people viewing the post.  

Click through rate = (Total clicks / Total impressions) x 100 

Cost per Click (CPC)  

CPC is the amount you pay to social media platforms every time a user clicks on your ad. Ideally, your CPC should be as low as possible.  

CPC = Total ad cost / Number of clicks  

Cost per Thousand Impressions (CPM)  

CPM is the total amount you pay to social media platforms every time 1000 people scroll past your advertisement.  

CPM = (Total ad spend / Total ad impressions) x 1000 

Revenue  

Revenue is the measure of the total money you’ve made from social media marketing efforts. This could include sales made directly from shoppable posts or landing page clicks that turn into purchases.  

To track total sales revenue received through a social media platform, you can use tracking codes in your URLs.  

Customer Satisfaction KPIs  

More action on your social media profiles doesn’t necessarily mean good things for your business! That’s where customer satisfaction KPIs come into the picture! 

These metrics are direct indicators of how your customer base feels about the brand.  

Testimonials  

Testimonials are reviews and ratings dropped by your consumers on social platforms like Google My Business or Facebook.  

With the help of testimonials, one can easily judge the public sentiment around your brand. 

Customer satisfaction score (CSAT)  

This score tells you how happy the customers are with the products or services provided to them.  

To get CSAT, you need to send the consumers a feedback form or survey where they will rate the overall experience with your brand.  

Customer satisfaction score = (Sum of scores / Number of responses) x 100  

Customer lifetime value (CLV or CLTV)  

CLV is the total revenue a brand can expect to generate from a particular consumer during its lifetime. 

CLV = Average purchase value x Average purchase frequency x Average customer lifespan 

Community Growth KPIs 

At their core, social media platforms are networking sites and a great way for you to build a community of like-minded individuals who can help your business grow.  

Some community growth key performance indicators are:  

New subscribers  

New subscribers or followers are members that have joined your social media in a given period of time.  

Referral traffic  

Number of new people in the community that have been referred by the existing members. 

Net Promoter Score (NPS)  

NPS is a metric that talks about a consumer’s loyalty, satisfaction, and enthusiasm towards the company. It is determined after asking customers “How likely they are to recommend this company to a friend or colleague?”  

How to Track Social Media KPIs?  

When it comes to tracking key performance indicators, there are 3 ways:  

  • Using built-in analytics  
  • Creating custom reports  
  • Using a third-party tool  

Using a social media platform’s built-in analytics is an easy and free-of-cost solution for tracking KPIs. However, it isn’t ideal for marketers and social media managers who are managing multiple accounts across various platforms.  

Creating custom reports is another way to bring all data together but it requires a great deal of time and resources to do so.  

That’s where Vaizle jumps to your rescue!  

Vaizle is a comprehensive marketing analytics suite that brings data from all social and ad platforms to a single dashboard.  

Instead of switching between multiple tabs or applications, you can simply view the required social media KPIs in an intuitive dashboard.  

Vaizle offers multiple free tools for social media analysis including:  

With Vaizle, you can:  

  • View the page overview to quickly review the account performance 
  • Know the best day to post with daily analysis  
  • Check content-type analysis and top posts for your account 

Conclusion  

Keeping track of key performance indicators is an important step of your social media marketing journey.  

KPIs are crucial to analyze your performance, judge the effectiveness of your social media strategy, and know how your brand is performing against competitors.  

Get started with Vaizle today to streamline your task of tracking and analysing social media KPIs. Bonus Point: You can now begin a 7-day trial only for $1.  

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What are the 5 key performance indicators in marketing?

Marketing KPIs depend on your business goal and requirements. Some of the common key performance indicators are Impressions, Shares, Click-through Rate (CTR), Cost per Click (CPC), and Conversion rate. 

2. Which of these KPIs demonstrate engagement?

KPIs demonstrating engagement are Likes, Shares, Comments, Saves, or Mentions.  

3. What is the most important KPI in social media?

It is hard to find the single most important KPI for social media. Here are some of the crucial key performance indicators examples:  

  • Reach 
  • Impressions 
  • Likes 
  • Click-through Rate (CTR) 
  • Conversion Rate  

4. How to measure social media ROI?

To measure social media ROI, you need to constantly track key performance indicators that align with your goals. Finally, use the KPI data to find the value of earnings made through your social media channels.  

About the Author

Mamta

Mamta

Mamta is an SEO Analyst with 2 years of experience. Currently, she is spending her time on content roadmapping to drive organic growth and engagement for SaaS businesses. Mamta is also an avid cinephile who spends her spare time watching latest action and sci-fi flicks from around the world.

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