Understanding Organic Social Media KPIs

When you look at your marketing tree, each branch represents a different marketing channel you are using to drive growth for your business.

‍

As you continue to build out your marketing efforts and grow your revenue, you want to be able to see which branch is growing the quickest and bringing you the most success. Marketing attribution helps you see exactly that! By using marketing attribution, you are able to identify which branch led to a sale.

‍

When you start looking closer at each branch individually, you will want to do some additional reporting. With organic social media, you may want to see which channel is growing the fastest or bringing in the most new potential customers.

‍

There are many different key performance indicators (KPIs) that marketers use to evaluate the success of an organic social media strategy.

‍

Here are a few of the most important ones, and what you need to know to understand what these mean for your business:

Types of KPIs for Organic Social Media

There are two main categories that KPIs for organic social media fall into: reach and engagement. Each KPI has its own information you can learn from, so let’s take a look at a few of the key ones many businesses use to monitor their social media success:

Engagement KPIs

Engagement‍

Engagement is the number of likes, shares, comments or reactions on a post. You can look at the number of engagements itself, or at the engagement rate (but be consistent in the KPI you are watching so you don’t get confused!).

‍

These metrics will help you understand how people are interacting with your content and what types of posts they like best.

‍Click-through rate (CTR)‍

If you’re creating a lot of content that links to your website, CTR will tell you which platform and which posts are sending traffic over to the site. This is often a higher intent KPI, and can tell you which product, service or blog post is generating a lot of interest.

Reach KPIs

Impressions‍

If you want to see how many times a post was in the feed or timeline, the impression will give you that information. However, keep in mind that just because it was in their feed doesn’t mean the person looked at it. They may have scrolled right past or skimmed the information you shared.

‍Followers‍

Follower count, or new follower growth, is a good metric to watch if you are trying to increase brand awareness. This gives you the chance to grow your potential customer base and get your content in front of more new people.

Setting KPIs for Organic Social Media

By selecting a few of these KPIs to keep track of, you will be able to monitor and measure the success of your organic social media strategy. This can give you an idea of the ROI for your business as you continue to evolve your marketing.

‍

In order to fully understand how social media is working for you, you should:

• Set a goal for social media (brand awareness, lead generation, reputation management, etc.)
• Identify KPIs that align with that goal (followers, website visits, PDF downloads, contact form submissions, etc.)
• Track KPIs over time, whether that is monthly or quarterly, via a social media reporting tool or just in a spreadsheet.
• Use the data gained from KPIs to make adjustments to your strategy for better results going forward.

If you’re ready to see how organic social media KPIs can grow your business, elk's social media team can help! Get in touch today to discuss your goals and how social media can become another, or a stronger, branch on your marketing tree.