This guest column is by Rishabh Dev, Managing Director at

So many tools, so many metrics, but which are the right ones for a startup?

As an entrepreneur, it is impossible to evade the need for social media marketing in the modern day business environment. Running a digital marketing company and having worked with a number of startups, I’ve seen entrepreneurs focus on all the wrong metrics all the time.

Vanity metrics such as likes and followers hold importance when it comes to making you look cool among your friends. The real metrics to be focused on from a business perspective are the ones that translate into branding or revenue growth, and can be monetized, directly or indirectly.

Engagement with followers is more important than number of followers alone as that is more likely to lead to conversions and hence, revenue generation.

Whether you have an in-house team or an agency on record, here are the 20 most important metrics you need to keep your eyes on at all times. It is absolutely essential for an entrepreneur to be able to tweak and adapt social media marketing strategy based on inputs from the following metrics:

And yes. Not 5, not 10. It’s 20. As an entrepreneur you need to stay on top of your marketing. You need these 20 to get a holistic view of your marketing. They’re categorised for you and pick the most important outputs based on your social media goals.

ACTIVITY

1. Content rate: Content created over a specific time-period
2. Post topic mix: Percentage of posts to each social media network per time-period broken by content topic
3. Post type mix

REACH

4. Audience growth rate: The rate at which a brand adds (or loses) audience members per channel
5. Share of audience: The percentage of people a brand will reach as compared to its competitors
6. Share of engagement: How a brand’s engagement metrics compare to others in similar fields

ENGAGEMENT

7. Amplification rate: The number of shares on average for each post.
8. Applause rate: The number of approval actions, or virtual “applause,” (+1, likes, etc) you get from your audience per period
9. Average engagement rate: The percentage of your total audience that has engaged with your content in any way on a social channel per reporting period.
10. Conversation rate: The number of conversations (comments, replies, etc) going on per social media post

ACQUISITION

1. Click-through rate: The rate at which your audience clicks on a link within a post on a given social network (number of clicks on a post divided by the number of impressions for the post)
2. CPC: Cost-per-click (for paid search or social advertising)
3. Leads: The number of potential sales contacts earned through social media per time period

CONVERSION

4. Conversions:  Number of conversions per time period (email subscriptions, downloads, registrations, installs, etc)
5. Conversion rate: The percentage of users who take a desired conversion action, found by dividing number of conversions by total traffic per period
6. Cost per conversion: Dollar amount of how much a brand pays in order to attain a conversion
7. ROI or return on investment: Revenue generated by social media efforts divided by all known social media expenses

RETENTION

8. Customer retention rate: The percentage of the total number of customers retained in context to the customers that have cancelled.
9. Customer turnover rate/churn: A measure of the number of customers who leave over a specific period of time
10. Brand evangelists: Number of customers your brand would consider evangelists based on their social media advocacy

Based on your business requirements, you can pick and choose the ones that matter to you the most. Don’t forget that these metrics define the success or failure of your social media campaigns. Keep a track on these along with an eye on the big picture and your overall marketing strategy in mind.