Here are some important home truths about social media KPIs:
- Tracking social media isn’t just a matter for your marketing department.
- Not all social media metrics are equally useful and valuable to your business.
- Many businesses focus on the wrong ones.
There is plenty of value to be found in customer-created content on social media. But with endless social listening tools out there capable of measuring countless different metrics, it can be difficult to discern which social media KPIs are worth tracking, and which are, frankly, a waste of time.
We’ll look at the top three social media KPIs worth measuring, why they’re increasingly important and how you can easily get an accurate and in-depth understanding of consumer conversations online.
What’s In A Like?
Before we get to our list, a quick word on vanity metrics.
Typically, marketers focus on impressions, likes, shares and retweets. These metrics are easy to track and tabulate.
They’re a decent measure of engagement and the success of your marketing campaign, but they do little else to inform you of your business.
For example, these metrics don’t tell you anything about consumer behaviour and they tell you nothing about the customers’ experiences of your brand or product. So though they can be useful, vanity metrics didn’t make the cut.
Top 3 Social Media KPI Metrics
Without further ado, here are our top three social media KPI metrics, in no particular order.
1. Share of voice
Traditionally, share of voice was measured by comparing your media spending with your competitors. But increasingly, it refers to your brand’s visibility online compared to your competition.
Share of voice is measured as a percentage. The more mentions your brand receives in comparison to other brands in your industry, the higher your share of voice.
Share of voice gives you a straightforward and clear overview of the landscape of your market. By tracking share of voice over time, you can spot whether any of your competitors are gaining traction, and investigate further to take appropriate action before they dominate the market.
Since social media share of voice is measured using publicly available data, it’s a non-intrusive form of competitor intel.
2. Mentions by topic
What drives your customers to choose you over your competitors? What pain points threaten their customer loyalty? Your customers are out there sharing their experiences of your brand and your products in comments, posts, and reviews on social media.
But this non-numerical data is often overlooked. Without the right technology, long form text is difficult (if not impossible) to accurately capture, measure and analyse on a large scale.
Rudimentary social listening tools simply use word clouds to show chich words occur most frequently in online conversations, but now there are far more advanced ways of analysing unstructured text data.
Symanto’s cutting-edge natural language processing (NLP) technology accurately identifies topics and organises information so that you can get detailed insight into what your customers are talking about.
This technology, recognises synonyms to and nuances in speech, can group topics together and then divide them by subtopics. This information is organised into interactive data visualisations that enable you to navigate the information and explore it at the level detail that you require.
3. Net sentiment by topic
Increasingly, your reputation is defined by what people say about you. Around half of consumers distrust paid media, while a whopping 92% say they trust earned media. Earned media is any exposure or publicity that isn’t gained through paid marketing and advertising, and that includes organic social media content.
Your customer’s opinions matter more than ever. Getting an accurate measure of their sentiment is a crucial first step in determining how you should develop your product and market your brand.
As mentioned at the start of our blog, social media metrics aren’t just a measure of your marketing and PR campaigns. This metric in particular gives you clear insights into the strengths and weaknesses of your product from the perspective of the people that matter most: your customers.
Symanto measures sentiment by topic and by subtopic so that you can get a precise understanding of what aspects of your product need development, and which are driving your products success amongst your existing consumer base.
Furthermore, Symanto makes benchmarking easy. Compare conversations across multiple brands to find out how your performance compares. Are your competitors facing similar challenges? Is one of your competitors meeting the needs of your customers better, and if so, how?
The interactive nature of the Symanto dashboard allows you zoom in on relevant conversations to see exactly what customers are saying.
Get started with Symanto
Symanto technology makes it easy to measure and compare these social media KPIs and get other interesting insights from socal media data such as consumer psychographics. For more information, get in touch or book your free personalised demonstration today.
