When social media is integral to your plan for expanding brand recognition and servicing existing customers, you need to develop a more sophisticated approach. Companies that spend a lot of money on social media need cutting-edge methods and extensive documentation to prove the worth of their spending.

Review Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) used by competitors

You may be familiar with “vanity metrics,” or measures used in social media that are merely cosmetic and provide no meaningful insight. Likes, shares, and retweets are all examples of vanity metrics. They appear significant, and to some extent they are, but they won’t aid your business in making critical decisions regarding its social media marketing.

Reach

The reach of your post, page, profile, campaign, or content is the total number of unique users that saw it and interacted with it. When trying to increase brand recognition, the most important factor is how far your message can travel. It’s also helpful for getting a better sense of the size of your prospective market. By offering incentives for subscribers and writing content that inspire a lot of discussion, you may grow your audience naturally.

Impressions

Reach and impressions are comparable but not identical. Difference between reach and impressions is that reach measures the total number of people that saw your content and engaged with it, whereas impressions measure simply how many times your content was seen by a single user. Users are not included in the total for impressions. If first impressions don’t matter for cutting-edge marketing techniques, what do they serve? Brand awareness and virality are two more metrics that need the number of impressions to be calculated.

Name recognition

Brand awareness is the total amount of interest in your company within a certain time period across all social media platforms. You and your team must settle on a measure for focus that you feel adequately captures the level of interest you have in the brand. It might be anything from shares and links to mentions and views. To get a more accurate feel for how well-known your brand is, it’s a good idea to use a listening tool to keep tabs on any mentions of it, tagged or untagged.

Acceptance procedures

Appropriate responses include “likes,” “reactions,” and “favorites,” and they may be used to gauge how well something is received. Pick an accounting time frame and tally up your approval steps for a single post. Once you get that figure, divide it by the entire number of your followers, then multiply the result by 100 to get your applaud rate %. Your team may assess how well a post connected with your audience over a certain time period by looking at the approval actions and applaud rate. Pay attention to the material that is successful in your industry if you want to boost approval actions.

Shares

When someone shares or retweets your content, they are actively exposing it to their own followers. Creating content that people want to talk about is harder than it seems. Users contribute material to help define their profiles for others and to establish connections, thus this content must be important enough that the user wants their audience to see it too. The most popular forms of shared content are those that are either lengthy, visually appealing (such as a list or infographic), or look credible to the reader. The willingness of your audience to identify with your brand may be gauged in part by keeping tabs on the number of times they share your content.

Discussions and responses

Comments and replies are user-generated reactions to a post. The comments are typically located under the main post. Questions, controversial statements, and emotional appeals tend to get the most comments from users. Tracking comments in relation to your number of followers can provide you a more accurate picture of how they affect your brand than just counting them. To calculate your conversion rate, take the total number of comments you received during the reporting period, divide it by the total number of followers, and then multiply the result by 100. If your conversion rate is high, it means that your audience is engaged enough with your brand to initiate contact.

Virality

The virality rate provides some perspective on a post’s total number of views. It’s determined by taking the number of shares for a certain post and dividing it by the number of impressions for that post, then multiplying by 100. The more people who share a post, the greater its chance of becoming viral, and viral postings are essential for getting the word out. By calculating the virality of individual postings, you may learn what makes them successful and duplicate that formula in the future.

Conversions

The success rate of your social media marketing efforts is probably one of the most important KPIs to your company’s upper management. It’s one of the simplest ways to gauge the success of your social media campaigns. But it’s not the easiest thing to keep tabs on. When a social media user takes an action that advances an objective, we say that the person has converted. This might be anything from downloading an asset to filling out a contact form to completing a purchase on your site. You need to set up Goals in Google Analytics to monitor your social media’s ROI. Conversions can’t be tracked on a social networking site alone since users typically navigate away from the site before completing a conversion.