13 Social Media KPIs to Measure For Business Growth In 2022
If you use social media for business, you need a plan in place to assess and evaluate your social media KPIs. Having a digital content strategy is great, but tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) allows your social media team to understand if the content connects with the audience and helps achieve business goals.
What Are Social Media KPIs?
KPI means key performance indicators.
Businesses use KPIs to assess and evaluate a company's performance over time. This assessment helps marketers understand which goals are met and the strategies that need to be tweaked to improve business performance.
In a similar vein, social media KPIs measure the effectiveness of a social strategy or campaign on different social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Instagram, where you share the brand's content.
There are several key performance indicators when it comes to social media marketing. The goal is to choose the metrics that align with your marketing campaigns and outcomes.
In this post, we list down crucial social media metrics that you can track and measure to improve engagement:
Important Social Media Metrics To Track For Your Business In 2022
Reach
Reach is the number of unique visitors who saw your post when it went live. When trying to increase the reach of your posts, it’s crucial to target the right audience
interested in your products and services. Once you have determined your target audience and the posts they like, you can create content that is engaging and meaningful to them.
What To Measure
Impressions
Impressions are the number of times your post appeared on someone’s timeline or newsfeed. This doesn’t mean the person has engaged with the post. It’s possible they scrolled past it, but it counts as an impression.
Follower Count
This KPI measures the number of followers on your social media channel at a specific point in time. When tracking the follower count, looking at the engagement rate is crucial.
Suppose you have 1000 followers on Instagram, but only one or two people engage with the post through likes, comments, or shares. This can either mean the account has bots/fake followers or the content doesn’t connect with the intended audience. Either way, you need to take a hard look at your content strategy and understand what needs to be fixed.
Website Traffic
This is one of the most important KPIs that tell you how much website traffic your social media posts generate. It’s how you move the users down the funnel and convert them into paying customers.
Engagement
Social media engagement is the quality of interactions with your followers. This measures how the target audience responds and reacts to your content and how effective your brand campaigns are.
What To Measure
Likes
This KPI measures the number of times your social followers interacted with the brand by liking a post on social media. Though many see this as a vanity metric, it can boost engagement as more people are likely to interact with a post when they see others like it.
Shares
Social shares tell you how popular your content is with the target audience and help drive visibility to your brand. This is a great metric to understand the content formats that work for your brand and how you can double down on those to improve engagement.
Mentions
This social media metric keeps you up-to-date with what people say about the brand on different social media channels. It’s a great way to tap into users' thoughts about the brand, content, and products/services. You can use this data to know more about their preferences and create content best suited to their interests.
Comments
Comments are not only a great engagement metric but also tell you how a user perceives your product or post. All comments may not always be positive, but even the negative ones can help improve your product or marketing strategy. A high number of comments indicate users like your content and are willing to engage with the brand.
Clicks
This is the most effective metric to measure the success of your social media strategy. Most businesses use social media to divert traffic to an external website to facilitate the sale of a product or service. If a user clicks on the website link, they are interested in the product/service and want to know more about it. This means your content marketing strategy is effective in bringing qualified leads, which is ultimately the goal of social media marketing.
Conversions
This KPI measures how many social interactions with the followers or visitors convert into product/service sales, newsletter sign-ups, product demo sign-ups, etc. The conversion could be monetary or non-monetary, depending on the brand’s goals, but it can establish the effectiveness of a social media strategy in leading users to take the final step.
What To Measure
Leads Generated
Generating leads is crucial for business. Not every lead will convert, but it’s worth considering how many people are visiting the website through social media channels, downloading e-books, and signing up for newsletters and product demos to refine the social media strategy that suits the interests of the target audience.
Social Media Conversion Rates
You are posting on social media, and people are liking or commenting on the post, but how many users convert into customers? A straightforward way to determine this is by dividing the total social traffic from the number of social media conversions. You can also track these numbers using Google Analytics, HubSpot, or Salesforce.
Sales Revenue
This refers to the revenue generated from social media conversions. Once you know the number of people who visit your site through social media and the total revenue generated, you can assign a number or value to a prospect. This allows you to set a budget for social media campaigns and anticipate ROI from the efforts.
Measure Social Media KPIs To Drive Business Performance
Tracking social media metrics isn’t easy, but it’s worth the time and money. It helps to improve marketing strategy, calculate ROI from social media efforts, and improve long-term customer standing. Not all businesses need to track all KPIs. Depending on the campaign goals, social media managers can choose to follow some metrics and ignore others. Measuring the correct KPIs can help you understand the best way to communicate with your target audience and the strategies to help you achieve business growth in 2022.
Average Social Media Marketing Costs in 2022
Social media marketing costs depend on several factors across platforms and industries.
According to the Search Engine Journal, 84% of the US population use at least one social media channel. The active number of users worldwide stands at 57.6%, which means at least half of the population uses one social media channel a month.
Brands are monetizing social media more than ever, making it an essential part of their content marketing strategy. As a result, companies are spending more on social media ads, with a projected ad spending of US $0.23 M in 2022.
This leads to the question: How much should you expect to spend on social media marketing?
This guide will help you uncover the typical social media marketing costs, the amount organizations spend on it, and the factors that can affect the spending.
What are the Average Social Media Marketing Costs?
Social media marketing costs vary based on what services you need and how frequently you need them. Here's what you can expect to pay local US professionals:
- Average cost (per month): $400 - $650
- Minimum cost (per month): $295
- Maximum cost (per month): $1000+
- How Much Do Organizations Spend On Social Media Marketing?
The marketing spend is influenced by several factors such as the company size, the industry, the services offered, and the total revenue.
On average, businesses invest $4000 to $7000 per month on social media marketing, which includes advertising on one or more channels. If outsourcing, the social media cost ranges from $900 to $20,000 per month and $75 to $500 per hour for a consultant or freelancer's services.
What Changes The Cost Of Social Media Marketing?
The amount you'll pay for social media marketing depends on the following factors:
1: Taking It In-House
Average cost: $30 - $100 per month
If you're planning to create and manage everything yourself, set aside a minimum amount to get started. You can use this to build knowledge or purchase tools to help you get started.
As a one-person team, you must create content, keep up with posting on social media, respond to mentions and comments, and track the critical KPIs.
There are affordable subscription-based services that can help to automate social media marketing. Tools such as Buffer have a scheduler to create and schedule posts in advance. Hootsuite tracks all the social feeds together, so you don't have to open activities in different tabs.
If you're looking to take your social media in-house, consider investing in free or paid tools to help you ideate, plan, and manage content marketing, so you have time to look into other business areas.
2: Outsourcing on a Smaller Budget
Average cost: $500 - $1000 per month
Small businesses have tight budgets, but it's possible to outsource social media marketing to an agency on a limited budget.
Agencies have different packages and pricing models that you can choose from depending on your budget. In addition, each agency charges differently depending on expertise since there is no standard industry pricing for social media marketing.
Seven Oaks Consulting offers outsourced social media post creation and adding posts to scheduling tools at prices within this monthly range.
3: Outsourcing on a Larger Budget
Average cost: $1500 to $5000 per month
If you have a larger budget, the world is your oyster. You can opt for a superior, more expensive agency with a faster turnaround and more resources dedicated to your account.
But hiring an expensive agency might not always translate into results. You want to hire an agency that is credible and has significant achievements to show. A good marketing agency will ask you about your niche, industry, current marketing strategy, and previous marketing failures. Make sure the agency you choose can deliver consistent results while staying true to the brand vision.
Hiring a Social Media Expert — Is It Worth The Investment?
If you lack the resources and expertise to manage social media channels, getting an expert on board is worth the investment. They can plan the content for social media channels, schedule them, and monitor the performance.
Maintaining an edge via social media can be tricky, but experts can help to streamline content based on the target audience to get the most from your buck. A dedicated social media expert can help you determine what works for your brand on different platforms and how you can maximize the revenue with current strategies.
If you need help with social media marketing, Seven Oaks Consulting can help. We are a full-service marketing agency specializing in social media marketing and content creation. Contact Jeanne at (434) 574-6253 or email jeanne@sevenoaksconsulting.com for more information on our social media post creation and scheduling services.
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Why Article Spinners Will Never Replace Writers
AI-generated content is increasing in popularity, as more companies are now using article spinners to create content faster and in a shorter amount of time. This number is bound to grow, as per Statista, and the global AI software market will reach $126 billion by 2025.
Various software programs in the market can help you create content quickly; some can even rewrite or paraphrase text, such as article spinning tools.
Are Article Spinners Useful For Content Marketing?
An article spinner is a software tool that rewrites or paraphrases the input text while keeping the original meaning intact. This results in a distinct article with the same meaning as the existing text.
While article spinners can be helpful to ramp up content production and meet the continuous demands, they don’t come close to the original, research-backed, and comprehensive pieces that are written by a demonstrated expert.
Here are three reasons why article spinners will never replace creative content writers.
Article Spinning Tools aren't creative
Creativity is inherent to us. It comes from our experiences, memories, and emotions and cannot be replicated and automated by software. Content written by humans has the power to inspire, motivation, and entertain, which is difficult for AI.
At best, the automated software programs can take a chunk of text and convert it into a semi-coherent and legible piece of writing. Still, they cannot duplicate the way writers process the language and come up with ideas or words that strike resonance.
Article spinners Cannot Write A Lengthy, Coherent Piece Of Text
Article spinners can do a decent job producing short-form pieces, but they cannot create cohesive, engaging, and meaningful long-form articles that are often used in content marketing strategies.
A good long-form strategy involves neck-deep research, laying the groundwork, composing sub-sections, and ensuring structural flow in the article. AI struggles to connect the dots and often does not have the required knowledge on various topics to build a solid, valuable piece of writing.
Definition: Article Spinner
An article spinner is software that paraphrases or rewrites the original text often by substituting synonyms for words.
Article Spinning Tools Cannot Add Variety
Sometimes short sentences work better. Sometimes longer sentences establish a better flow and rhythm to keep the readers hooked. The automated rewriting tools cannot vary the sentence length or change the flow to make the article engaging.
Of course, you can program style guides and tone into AI tools, but for that, too, you need a professional writer.
AI Cannot Replace Marketing Writers
While AI has come far and is now integrated into all spheres of our lives, it still has a long way to go in replacing the originality and creativity of experienced writers.
Rather than looking at AI as a replacement, it’s more useful to look at it as a guide or aide that can help marketing writers to research faster, structure sections based on SEO suggestions, and automate repetitive tasks in content marketing as and when required. But the actual job of writing should be left to the experts in the field.