How to choose the right social media KPIs for your business
Social media can play a vital role in online marketing and often increase your chances of success. That’s why it is so important to know how to measure business success.
So how can you measure success for your social media campaign? The short answer is social media key performance indicators or KPIs for short.
Social media KPIs are great ways to put a quantifiable value on concepts such as social media which are not easily turned into marketable statistics.
Social Media Goals/Objectives
Having goals is fundamental for a business. It’s important to know where they want to be and helps in strategizing to achieve it. More importantly, knowing where you want to be will help to understand how far from your goals are you right now, who and what resources do you need. All of these are fundamental to finding the key performance indicators further into your social media strategy.
What types of social media KPIs should you measure?
Customer satisfaction:
- This form of KPI measures metrics that allow you to understand how much customers appreciate your content and how you can do it better. Whether your customers are happy or upset, just knowing what they feel and having a way to measure that is invaluable.
Internal process quality:
- This measure refers to the production and quality of the content and whether it meets the expectations of consumers. Is your content high quality, does it match the expectations of consumers? Most importantly does your content adhere to social media policies? Having the right answers to these questions matters. Especially if high-quality content is something you want your customers to expect and to appreciate.
Employee satisfaction:
- Providing excellent customer satisfaction should not be the single goal of a business. Businesses should be able to provide satisfaction to both customers and employees. Poor employee satisfaction reduces the odds of finding high-value recruits.
Financial Performance Index:
- This is the index for identifying and measuring the financial success of a social media campaign. A typical financial metric is the ROI (return on investment). ROIs are important figures in determining what may equate to financial success. Financial metrics are the easiest to track with figures such as sales and expenses being the final determinant for success. In other words, brands seeking profit can track their financial metrics by calculating their revenue. Whereas metrics such as followers and likes on social media do not equate to financial success.
How can I choose metrics using these KPIs?
Choosing a metric not only requires you to know whether your brand wants to focus on customer care or financial success. Metrics come in three figures: raw numbers, progress and change in value.
The value of these figures change depending on how you plan to market your social media strategy. For instance, sales executives would prefer to receive raw numbers and percentage increases in financial KPIs. On the other hand, a social media team would prefer progress and change as it could serve as a goal metre.
What goals you choose ultimately come down to who you want to provide your metrics to and what they actually want.
How do I find my social media metrics?
Your metrics come from a variety of sources that are very accessible. These sources include; profit and loss statements, project plans, social media audits and 3rd party analytics services.
P&L statements and project plans are the easiest to track, unlike metrics that belong to social media such as ad-clicks and lead conversions.
So how do I track these social media metrics? The answer is analytics services.
Analytics services like Google Analytics are a must for tracking where web traffic is coming from and going. These services convert data into usable information to find the needs and wants of consumers
.
Google Analytics is a free analytics tool that provides an easy to use dashboard. Uses include identifying how many website visits you have from which social media and what part of your websites are most visited.
Sprout Social is another useful tool that provides valuable insights. This includes info on current social media trends and what you should be uploading and when.
Other useful analytics tools include:
- TapInfluence
- Keyhole
- BuzzSumo
- Snaplytics
- Curalate
- HubSpot
Conclusion
Having a successful social media strategy must include having an understanding of good social media KPIs and how they can work for you.
Whether it’s customer satisfaction or growing financial figures, having good metrics is a must. Using appropriate metrics can drive a successful social media strategy no matter what your goals are.
