In today’s digital age, social media is critical to your business’ success. Here are some key performance indicators (KPIs) that measure the performance of your content.

Social media has grown more than just a trend as it has developed to be a powerful business marketing strategy. In fact, according to statistics, about 93% of marketers around the world use social media for their businesses. Meanwhile, 77% of businesses use this tool to reach their customers. 

With around 4.9 billion social media users globally, being online means facing tougher competition—especially since you want your business to be noticed by your target market. This is why every social interaction counts.

But how can it be measured? Through key performance indicators (KPIs), which give you a good look at how your posts and online presence are doing. 

In this article, we delve into the different kinds of social media KPIs for your social media posts. By understanding what each one stands for and what they focus on, it becomes easier to analyze points of improvement so that they can be acted upon more effectively and immediately. 

1. Follower Count

Follower count is a fundamental social media KPI that reflects your brand’s reach and influence. Although having lots of followers does not immediately equate to having a successful brand, it lays the foundation for having an established number of brand believers. 

This is because having many followers signifies a growing audience that potentially leads to increased brand visibility and credibility. More often than not, people are more likely to follow businesses that have lots of followers compared to those that have a few. 

Follower count also matters in terms of having people engage and show interest in your posts. With that, it becomes a metric of how effective your marketing and content strategies are. 

2. Impressions and Post Reach

Impressions and post reach determine online visibility and content performance. It also pertains to the total number of times that a post was shown or loaded on a user’s screens, while post reach refers to how many users have actually seen the content. Unlike impressions, post reach is only counted once—regardless of how many times a user views the content. 

Both of these metrics gauge how attention-grabbing your content is and how effective it might be. Technically speaking, high impressions signify great content visibility, while having a high post reach means that your potential audience is growing larger. 

3. Reactions 

Reactions refer to the likes, hearts, and other emojis that users use to react to content on social media platforms like Facebook or Instagram. These are considered valuable KPIs, as they immediately reflect user sentiment and engagement with content, as well as the emotional impact that content evokes with its audience. 

Likes and hearts reflect positive impact and satisfaction for those who’ve seen the content. Meanwhile, negative reactions like angry or sad reactions can help you assess what your target audience prefers to see and not to see. That way, these simple reactions can actually help redirect your marketing efforts into producing what your target market would like. 

4. Interactions (Comments, Shares, and Saves)

Unlike reactions—which somehow work as a surface-level engagement—interactions in the form of comments, shares, and saves reflect a deeper sense of involvement and interest among target audiences. Comments also allow you to directly know the insights of your community and can spark meaningful conversations with their valuable feedback. 

Meanwhile, shares are helpful tools that amplify your reach by allowing it to be seen by other audiences. Saves, on the other hand, reflect how much your target market considers your content to be valuable enough to be bookmarked for future references. Given all these, you can measure the quality of your content as you track how much it resonates with your audience.

5. Brand Mentions

Another valuable KPI you should track is brand mentions since they give you a direct idea about how your business is being perceived. There are two types of brand mentions that you have to check: explicit tags where you are directly mentioned, along with tagged or implicit tags—defined as “an effortless process by which content is tagged based on users’ spontaneous reactions.”

Tracking brand mentions allows you to gauge brand awareness and sentiments simultaneously. Positive comments allow you to pinpoint your strengths, while negative comments will show you the areas of improvement that you have to work on. 

Being aware of brand mentions also allows you to determine who are the influencers and the brand advocates who make your brand more recognizable. By recognizing who they are, it also becomes easier to track the trends in the social media space. 

6. Average Engagement Rate

The average engagement rate is an important percentage that allows you to track how effectively your brand connects with its audiences. This number shows the percentage of people who interact with your brand in relation to how many followers your brand has. 

This KPI reflects the quality of your content and how much it sparks audience engagement. Therefore, a high engagement rate signifies a strong community that can improve your online presence in algorithms. 

To calculate the average engagement rate, simply follow this formula:

AER = [(total engagements/total posts) ÷ total followers)] x 100

7. Click Through Rate (CTR)

CTR is an important KPI that focuses on conversion from your content. Specifically, it measures the effectiveness of how the content not only captures the audience’s attention but also manages to prompt audiences to engage after clicking on your links, ads, or emails. 

A high CTR can be helpful since it proves how compelling an ad is. Aside from that, a high CTR also helps a site or a social media account get better discoverability. 

Since it determines your social media account’s performance, here’s how you can compute for it manually:

CTR = (clicks ÷ impressions) x 100%

8. Cost Per Click (CPC)

If you’re running paid social media ads, it is also important that you use this KPI to track the financial efficiency of your advertising campaigns. Technically speaking, CPC pertains to the fee that you’d have to pay to an ad platform every time someone clicks on your ad.

And given how this tells you about your spending for tangible user engagement, tracking this becomes helpful in optimizing your ad budgets. That way, you’ll know that you’re getting the most of the amount you’re willing to spend. 

For this KPI, you would want to aim for a low CPS as it would mean that your ad targeting methods are more efficient. Meanwhile, high CPC may suggest that you adjust your strategies to achieve a better return on investment (ROI). 

To compute this, you can use this formula:

CPC = (total ad cost ÷ number of clicks) x 100

9. Conversion Rate

Conversion rate—often confused with CTR—is another KPI that measures how customers engage with a brand. Whereas CTR focuses on gauging content and ad performances, conversion rates determine the customer experience that people will get. This means that it focuses more on the marketability of the product and how social media posts drive tangible business outcomes.

To compute this, one would have to divide the number of people who performed the action (conversions) by those who clicked the post. This will then be multiplied by 100 to get the percentage. Visually, here’s what the formula looks like:

Conversion rate = (conversions ÷ total clicks) x 100

10. Bounce Rate 

Bounce rate pertains to the percentage of site visitors who quickly leave your page without interacting or taking any action. A high bounce rate may indicate a mismatch between your social media content and what you have on your site

Bounce rate pertains to the percentage of site visitors who quickly leave your page without interacting or taking any action. A high bounce rate may indicate a mismatch between your social media content and what you have on your site—thus driving them to navigate away from it after seeing it. 

For businesses, it is important to keep the bounce rate low in order to keep your content relevant to what people find on your social media pages. That way, you can ensure a smooth user experience for people who visit your social media account or site. 

Key Takeaways 

Given the tough competition on social media, it is with the help of these key performance indicators (KPIs) that you can be guided with your digital presence. By learning more about the important factors you’ll need to take into account, you can gain insights that will help you stay ahead of the curve in your chosen industry. 

Moreover, by being able to pinpoint your strengths and weaknesses, it becomes easier to fine-tune your content strategies that will help improve brand loyalty and cultivate a stronger social media presence. This is why appealing to customers becomes more achievable once you embrace more data-driven approaches that will help you analyze what your customers look for.