Organic Social Media KPIs Worth Measuring
While paid social media KPIs are essential to include in your key performance indicators, don’t forget to measure your organic social media efforts.
Organic social media marketing is highly cost-effective and plays a crucial role in your relationship with your customers. It should complement your paid advertising and your overall digital marketing strategy. Focus on what matters in your social media performance instead of chasing a lot of vanity metrics.
Your social media content can also create brand awareness while providing an authentic look into your organization. With ads coming at consumers left and right trying to increase the number of clicks, it’s refreshing for your audience to see engaging content that doesn’t feel like someone is constantly trying to sell something to them.
There are numerous data points to collect with social media, but here are a few of our favorite organic social media analytics:
1) Social Referral Traffic
Social referral traffic comes to your website, mobile site, app, online store, etc., from social media platforms. This referral traffic often comes from links in your social posts, and these links are often shared from one social platform to another. Most brands use referral traffic reports available in Google Analytics, or other analytics tools, to measure this metric.
This social referral is critical to monitor because it gets new users to your site and lets you see which social media platforms generate the most traffic and even conversions. Referral traffic can also boost your SEO as this income traffic can lead to an increase in brand mentions and exposure. To grow your social referral traffic, consistently post intelligent, relevant, and engaging content that will bring your target audience over to your website.
2) Social Conversion Rate
Social conversion rate refers to the total number of conversions from social media traffic as a percentage. Knowing this metric provides an understanding of the effectiveness of your posts and campaigns. Reviewing this KPI shows you which social channels perform better than others and gives insight into targeting future efforts.
Improving conversions could be as easy as adjusting the time of day you post or adjusting your headline. Or you might decide on a more complex strategy like restructuring your landing pages on your website to improve your bottom line. If social conversions are low across multiple platforms, it’s time to reevaluate your overall strategy, messaging, and goals.
3) Post Engagement Rate
Numbers don’t lie. Engaging social media posts are seen more and shared more in the ever-changing algorithm updates that attempt to put the best content into each person’s newsfeed. Your overall Post Engagement Rate can come from the number of likes, clicks, comments, retweets, and shares your post receives. Strong engagement maximizes reach, which helps build your audience.
Continued engagement will ensure the number of times that your audience sees your content and help create a loyal following. We all have those favorite brands and influencers we follow and constantly look forward to seeing what they post. Strong engagement metrics indicate that your content is interesting and resonates with your audience.
4) Page Follower Growth
Your follower count and the growth rate at which you gain those followers can tell quite the story in your KPIs. If you recently launched a new product or campaign and saw an upward spike in the number of people following your brand, that is an excellent indicator that your audience approves of what they are seeing.
It is important to analyze the type of followers you are gaining and their alignment with your objectives. Social media campaigns can vary by industry and platforms, so regularly monitor this KPI and adjust.
Although promotions, sales, incentives, and giveaways provide opportunities for initial growth, a well-rounded organic social media strategy will help ensure you keep your content engaging and performing.
5) Share of Voice
You can also monitor how your social media accounts perform compared to your competitors to measure your social media marketing strategy through a metric called Share of Voice
Using a social media monitoring tool, track your total number of brand mentions and your top competitors. To calculate Share of Voice as a percentage, add up the total of your brand mentions and divide that by the total number of brand mentions received by you and your competitors for the same social media channels.
Looking at the Share of Voice can often be a good metric to see how social media is helping you achieve your business goals in relation to your competitors targeting the same audience and similar demographics.
The organic social media KPIs worth measuring discussed here can inform your strategy for various platforms.
Are you looking to improve the organic social media strategy for your brand? Check out our Social Media Services.
