Social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, offer digital campaigners dozens of metrics to analyze. Many of these data points are vanity metrics, with meanings that don’t translate into the goals of your campaign.
Nevertheless, social media is an essential component of campaigning and there are a handful of social media metrics that serve as key performance indicators (KPIs) for your digital marketing.
Here are the four social media metrics your campaign must focus on:
Reach
60% of voters login to Facebook every single day. It’s the largest gathering in your district or state and it happens daily. Showing up at a forum, a county fair, or a parade wouldn’t get a second thought, but how many campaigns go days or weeks without posting on Facebook?
The true impact of your social media presence can be judged by the organic reach of your posts. Ignore the total number of followers you have on a platform and focus on how many of those who actually view your content.
Follower Growth Rate
Overall follower count is a vanity metric, but measuring the growth rate over time is a useful barometer for how well your social media marketing is performing. Following your campaign’s social profile is the first step in the conversion funnel.
A steady (or increasing) rate of follower growth means that you’re reaching more people AND they want to see more of your posts.
Engagement Ratio
As with followers, to avoid chasing vanity metrics, monitor your social media engagement ratio instead of simply raw numbers. What share of users reached by a post interact with it?
Say your Tweet has 1,000 impressions, 2 retweets, 3 replies, and 10 likes. Your engagement ratio is 1.5%. This is a much more informative number than simply 15 engagements.
Referral Traffic
Social media is a shared audience. You’re in control of what you post, but the data and distribution is controlled by the platform. With social media marketing, the objective is to convert followers into email subscribers, volunteers, and donors.
Google Analytics provides website owners with a view of social media referral traffic. Combined with UTM codes, you can monitor how much traffic your specific posts generate. Do more of the posts that send traffic and less of the ones that don’t.
As with any marketing effort, it’s essential with social media that you articulate the key performance indicators for your campaign. When there’s confusion about why you’re doing something, that’s when problems arise.
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