The first step to understanding your presence and value on social media is through tracking your social media KPIs. In our previous blog, ‘Tracking the Right KPIs for Your B2B Social Media Strategy,’ we mentioned the four KPIs you should be tracking to evaluate how effective your social media strategy is. The first KPI we mentioned was reach.
There are four sub-categories to the reach KPI your B2B business should be focusing on - impressions, follower count, website traffic, and share of voice. Measuring your social reach can be challenging, especially when your reach depends on when your audience is online and how valuable, informing or entertaining your content is to them. However, by tracking your data based on reach you can effectively and efficiently evaluate when you should be posting content and what kind of content your audience wants to read.
We’ve put together the four sub-categories of reach KPIs that your business should be evaluating at a closer level to track your growth, brand awareness, and target audience.
Impressions
Impressions are a great way to track how your social media content is performing in the moment. This means the number of times your post was visible in a person’s feed or timeline. It’s key to remember that a viewer doesn’t have to engage with your post to count as an impression. From measuring impressions, you can evaluate the potential your content has when it comes to visibility on social media channels and understand why your content may or may not be performing to the standard you want it to. Therefore, you may adust your publishing time to maximise the number of potential impressions you reach on each post.
Follower Count or Follower Growth Rate?
Follower count can be a great metric that boosts brand credibility but your follower growth rate is what is really important. Within a specific timeframe you can evaluate how many followers you are gaining or not gaining and why this is happening. Is it the type of content you are posting or is it from the amount of mentions or retweets you might be getting? Figuring out why it’s happening and how you can adjust to expand your reach and catch a new audience’s attention is crucial for your company’s social reach.
Website Traffic
Social media content is key to leading your audience to your website. If your audience is clicking through from your LinkedIn posts or tweets, it allows you to recognise that they are interested in finding out more about your company, and this is the first step to converting your followers to long-term customers. When evaluating this social metric, it can also enable you to see whether your call to actions (CTAs) need tweaking. If you aren’t gaining click throughs, could your CTAs be the problem?
Share of Voice
Share of voice is the metric that determines how your business compares to its competitors. Who’s talking about you? How many retweets or mentions are you gaining on social media sites? These are all questions that the data tracks, demonstrating your value within the industry and showing the amount of interest you’re developing from your audience about your company.
The more conversation around your company, the more brand awareness and recognition that could potentially lead to new customers and long-term relationships. If your competitors are generating more conversation, it may be time to evaluate what they are doing and where you can adjust your social media strategy. You can use social listening tools such as Hootsuite, Buffer, or HubSpot to make tracking share of voice easier and less time-consuming.
Tracking the changes in your growth, brand awareness and target audience is important to understanding what your company is doing right and what needs revisiting. There are many other social media metrics that you can measure but starting with your reach KPIs is a great place to begin building a strong social media strategy.
At Ilex, our expert team can help you reach your KPI goals through creating a social media content plan that improves your overall performance, increases brand awareness, and delivers a story that matters to your audience across all social media channels.