Social media is all the buzz nowadays, and if you aren't tracking your efforts, you may be missing out. With over 57% of the world's population on social media [https://www.smartinsights.com/social-media-marketing/social-media-strategy/new-global-social-media-research/] , it's important that you are staying consistent with your social media efforts and doing everything in your power to track your campaigns. You can do so by analyzing your key performance indicators (or KPIs). By keeping tabs on your KPIs, you can seamlessly track what's working and well and what's not. This can lead you to create better content in the future that will lead you closer and closer to your business goals! So, what exactly should you be measuring? To help you navigate the social media metrics world, we've put together a list of the social media KPIs you need to be measuring (especially if you aren't already). Let’s dive into. Share of voice Share of Voice [https://www.searchenginejournal.com/share-of-voice/359752/] is a metric that shows how popular your social media presence is compared to the competition. This metric is arguably one of the most important metrics to measure because it will give you further details on why other brands may be more popular than yours. Share of Voice can also help you with brand management, campaign tracking, consumer insights, and public relations. Reach Total reach tells you how many unique people you've reached with your posts in a given period of time. It's a great way to see if your audience has grown or declined. Something to take note of is the fact that your total reach will fluctuate on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis depending on the type of content you post and when you post it. While reach doesn't take into account how many of those people actually interact with your content, it's a great way to measure the size of your audience and see how it changes over time. For example, if you're posting between 2-4 AM and only 30 people see your content, that means there's a problem with the timing of your posts. You may want to take a look at your analytics in the backend to choose a more optimal time to post on social media for your target audience. Here is the formula to follow in order to capture total reach: > Reach = (unique pageviews/valuable impressions) x 100% Engagement rate For any brand or business, social media is where conversations and engagement take place. It's a great place to listen to what your audience is saying about you and your products — as well as engage with them. So, what is engagement rate? Engagement rate is the number of times you receive likes, retweets, comments, and mentions divided by total reach. Engagement rate reveals how much engagement each post receives in relation to your overall reach. For example, let's say you publish a blog post on Facebook that gets 100 impressions (people who see it in their feed). Out of those 100 people, 45 like it, 5 comment on it, and 2 share it on their feed. That means that out of the total reach of 100 people, 52% engaged with your post (45 likes, 5 comments, 2 shares), which translates into an engagement rate of 52%. Not too shabby! Here is the breakdown of the formula: > Engagement rate: (amount of engagement/total reach) x 100% Number of followers The number of followers you have is what we marketers like to call a "vanity metric [https://www.tableau.com/learn/articles/vanity-metrics]" (or a metric that looks good on paper but may not be the best indicator of your social media’s health). Your number of followers will populate at the top of your social media account page to show you how many people are following along with your content. Although follower count is a vanity metric, you shouldn't ignore your follower count completely. There are still some good reasons to keep watch over your followers. For instance, having a following can contribute to an increase in brand awareness and overall sales. You can also analyze your current following to compile essential demographic and psychographic information to make better content to delight your existing follower base for the future. Shares Have you ever heard of the phrase "sharing is caring"? Well, it really is in the world of marketing. Every time someone on social media shares your content, social media algorithms recognize that share. The algorithm then will continually showcase your content to more and more people online! Pro tip: Shares can also be an indicator to help you decide what kind of content your audience enjoys the most. You can then tweak that specific piece of content to make more social media posts like it! Impressions Another KPI to track is impressions. Although impressions don’t always translate to direct sales, impressions are still important to look at nonetheless. Impressions are the number of times your post was shown to users. Impressions do not take into account whether the user engaged with the post, but it will show you if the algorithm is starting to showcase your posts more or not. The higher your impressions, the more likely your content will be shown to a person who may have never heard of your brand before. You can view your impressions in free tools like Google Analytics [https://analytics.withgoogle.com] to help you get a holistic view of your campaigns. Click-through rate Click-through rate (or CTR) is where the money is — quite literally. Click-through rate refers to the number of times a post has been clicked on in comparison to the total number of people who have seen that specific post. The goal of your social media campaigns should always lead a user back to a certain action like purchasing from a link in your bio, clicking on your landing page, showcasing your brand, or educating viewers on your products or services. The higher your CTR, the more likely that specific user is considering purchasing from your company. Watch time As the name sounds, watch time is a key performance indicator (KPI) for social media that measures the average amount of time an audience member spends watching your content. The total watch time on your social media channels can be a great way to assess the effectiveness of your video marketing strategy and analyze the success of individual videos. Pro tip: The longer your videos keep people engaged, the more views and shares they are likely to generate. Cost-per-click Cost-per-click (CPC) is an important metric to measure if you are running advertisements on social media platforms. In short, CPC is the amount you pay every time someone clicks on an ad. If you're using TikTok Ads or Facebook Ads, your CPC would be the amount that it costs you every time someone clicks on that specific social ad. The goal of your social media managers would be to lower your CPC while ensuring that your ads are driving revenue. Likes It's not new news to anyone that social media is a major part of many marketing strategies. It's not enough to just build a Facebook page and wait for customers to come knocking; you have to closely monitor your social media channels to see what content resonates with your audience and how you can better connect with them. One way to better assess the success of your individual posts is to track how many "likes" or "reactions" your post has. When your audience interacts with your content, social media algorithms will be more likely to showcase your post more frequently in your audience's feed. Conclusion In the end, it's up to you and your organization to decide which KPIs you need to analyze the most. If you are focusing on gaining traction with short-form video in 2022, watch time may be a critical KPI for your marketing team to analyze as opposed to "retweets." Or, let's say you want to focus on Facebook Groups this upcoming year; you may be more interested in getting engagement on posts within the Facebook group instead of how many likes you are receiving on one post via your regular Facebook page. All in all, our hope is that you get into the habit of measuring your efforts so you can improve them over time. You may be surprised by what you find!
If you’ve spent any amount of time in the marketing industry, you’ve probably heard of UTM parameters. Marketers swear by them, and with good reason – but what exactly are they? “TM” stands for “tracking module,” and you might think that the “U” stands for “universal.” In fact, the full acronym stands for “Urchin Tracking Module,” with Urchin being the name of an analytical company that Google acquired back in 2005. It was the acquisition of Urchin that eventually led to the creation of Google Analytics [https://analytics.google.com]. What are UTM parameters? UTM parameters are essentially little tags that can be added to the end of a URL to gather more information on the way that people are accessing and using your website. When you combine UTM parameters with Google Analytics, Kissmetrics [https://www.kissmetrics.io], and other analytical tools, you can find out much more about your marketing campaigns. For example, you could see that visitors clicked on a link from an email newsletter that went out in November 2021 to promote your Black Friday sale. You could then look specifically at what these visitors did, such as whether they went on to make a purchase or whether they redeemed one of your discount codes. Of course, as with most good things, there’s also a downside, which in this case is that they make your links longer and much less aesthetically pleasing. That’s why a lot of marketers combine links using UTM parameters with URL shorteners. If you were creating a link with UTM parameters to track email traffic from your flash sale campaign and were sending out three different emails, you might end up with a link that looked a little something like this: https://www.example.com/?utm_source=email_three&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=flash_sale . You’re probably starting to see why it can be a good idea to run those links through a URL shortener. The good news is that most people don’t actually look at the address bar after they’ve clicked on a link, and so the average browser doesn’t even notice. Now that you know to look out for them though, you’ll see them everywhere. Why use UTM parameters There are a lot of great reasons to use UTM parameters. Let’s say that you’re running a Christmas campaign, and it’s generating a good amount of revenue, but you want to see which social media channels are sending you the best customers, or you want to compare email marketing versus pay-per-click. UTM parameters help you track the performance of individual marketing programs, campaigns, and channels, providing precise data on conversions and conversion rates. It makes your reporting much more accurate. You can even start calculating the exact amount of money it will cost you to acquire a new customer. At a more granular level, UTM parameters can help you see success on a post-by-post or ad-by-ad basis. You can run A/B tests, track influencer marketing campaigns by providing tailored links to each influencer and ultimately get a much better idea of what’s going on across your marketing channels. UTM parameters list When you’re using UTM parameters, there are three values that are required: source, medium, and campaign. Let’s take a look at those first. utm_source is designed to help you understand where your traffic is coming from, such as a banner ad or a social media post. For example: * utm_source=facebook for social posts and advertisements on Facebook. * utm_source=signature for links in email signatures. * utm_source=gdn for links in display advertisements on Google’s display network. utm_medium is the broadest and is used to categorize the communication medium that’s being used. For example: * utm_medium=social for all social networking traffic. * utm_medium=email for all email traffic. * utm_medium=cpc for all cost-per-click advertisements. utm_campaign refers to the specific campaign that’s being run and will change the most often of the three required parameters. For example: * utm_campaign=winterclothes for all activities promoting your winter clothes. * utm_campaign=blackfriday for all activities promoting your Black Friday sale. * utm_campaign=onboarding for all onboarding activities for new customers. Even though the parameters below are optional, it’s still a good idea to use them because it will help provide you with some additional info on how people are using your website and interacting with your content. utm_term is designed to help you understand which keywords attract your visitors. Most people use this parameter to track the keywords they’re paying for in their Google ads, but you can also use it to tag keywords in your calls-to-action. For example: * utm_term=metallica_tshirt to tag paid search campaigns for Metallica t-shirts. * utm_term=download to tag calls-to-action pushing people to download some content. utm_content is designed to provide further context on the content you’re linking to, but it can also be used to track any other information. It’s often used for A/B testing or differentiating between buttons and images. * utm_content=variant_one to tag the first variant in one of your A/B tests. * utm_content=button to tag a link that is attached to a button. Tips for using UTM parameters There’s an art and a science to using UTM parameters, and perhaps the most important thing is to make sure that they’re consistent. This is easy enough to do if you’re the only member of your team that’s using them, but if it’s a department-wide effort, then you’ll want to make sure that you’ve created a set of guidelines. The goal here is to make sure that the data you receive is as easy to read and understand as possible, which is why consistency is key. If one person uses “email” and one uses “email marketing,” the data will be split into two different categories. UTMs are case sensitive too, so consider always using lower case to avoid that being a problem. You should also avoid using UTM tags on internal links across your website because that can mess with your tracking and cause more problems than it solves. And while we’re on the subject of problems, be sure to check your analytics regularly to spot any inconsistent or mistyped UTM codes so that you can fix them before they throw all of your reports out. Of course, if you’re struggling to wrap your head around UTM parameters, help is available. There’s no shortage of tools out there designed to help you create links that use UTM parameters, including one from Google [https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033863#zippy=%2Cin-this-article]. SocialWeaver has got you covered, too. If you use our platform to manage your social media marketing campaigns, you can take advantage of our URL builder. It allows you to add UTM tracking to any links that you share from within the composer, and it integrates with Bitly [https://www.socialweaver.com/blog/introducing-bitly-and-socialweaver-integration] so that you can shorten the links before publishing. So if you haven’t already, why not give SocialWeaver a try [https://app.socialweaver.com/auth/register?planType=Free]? No credit card needed to get started.
