Social Media – KPIs & Metrics

I am passionate about a few things, and KPIs & Metrics are weirdly one of them. 

I love metrics. LOVE THEM. Why did a 25-year-old woman from Idaho like this post on a Tuesday at 3:05 Central Time? Despite your target audience being – 25-35-year-olds in California, why are people from Manilla, Philippines, engaging with your content? Should we consider expanding our goals/audience?

I can go on and on (trust me, I can) about the possibilities of trying to understand why people behave the way they do on social media but let me put a pause on this stream of thoughts to breakdown engagement – 

• Engagement: Social media engagement is measured by: likes, mentions, comments, clicks, shares, retweets, and more. ​
• Followers/Audience: Increasing viable followers (relevant to our industries and frequently engaging on social platforms) and follower retention. ​
• Impressions: The number of times the post was displayed, someone viewed the content but did not necessarily engage with it.​

Engagement is weighed differently on each platform, but here is a breakdown of what it commonly looks like – from Hootsuite:

ERR = total engagements per post / reach per post * 100

To determine the average, add up the all the ERRs from the posts you want to average, and divide by the number of posts:

Average ERR = Total ERR / Total posts

In other words: Post 1 (3.4%) + Post 2 (3.5%) / 2 = 3.45%

I always recommend keeping track of your metrics for each of your social channels to see the overall effectives (or ineffectiveness) of your efforts. This will open the door to many opportunities –

• Strategy – you may see that your engagement is preforms better on Instagram rather than Twitter so you will turn your focus more towards IG and restructure your strategy for Twitter.
• Content – Video is increasingly becoming the popular content on social media and you may start to see that your video or non-static content is preforming better than your still ones. If that is the case you, use this time to try out different types on your audience!
• Audience – as I mentioned above, you will use social media to reach and engage with your target audience and with metrics, you can see if you are actually doing it. If you are not reaching a set demographic, I would recommend reviewing data or behavior analysis’s on them.

What are other ways you can use metrics to enhance your social media experience?