- Start by asking:
- What are your Social Media Goals?
- What are you looking to achieve? (More sales, more clicks to your website, visibility)
- What do your customers want?
- How do your customers feel about the topic?
- Are you looking for content inspiration?
- Do you want to build your engagement?
- Set a social media KPI (Key Performance Indicators)
This is a quantifiable measurement used to evaluate the success of an organisation, in meeting objectives for performance.
Knowing your KPI’s from the start will help you make crucial decisions on:
- Content
- Adverts
- Budget and
- Other resources
- What you want to avoid is ‘Vanity Metrics’
Vanity metrics are when a surface-level metric is made up of numbers or statistics that seem great when viewed in a presentation but don’t correlate to business success, or not.
Example: Followers. Having lots of followers may look impressive, but if they are not the right people following you, they most certainly are not going to be buying or booking with you. A fashion brand or a café is going to have a lot more followers for example, than a local dentist.
YOU DO NOT WANT TO BUY FOLLOWERS!
An easy tell-tell if an account has bought followers is if you look at the number of followers and what sort of engagement they are getting. I recently looked at a mobile bar profile on Facebook that had 5600 followers. The average likes were 0-1 with no comments, likes, shares, or follows. The engagement rate did not match the followers.
The right KPI’s are vital. If you need to increase sales – vanity metrics of likes and shares are not going to be important metrics to measure.
But, if your goal is awareness, followers, reach and page views will be more important for you.
- 4 social media KPI’s to keep your eyes on
- Reach
- Engagement
- ROI (return on investment)
- Retention and loyalty
- Reach Goals – These are your important metrics:
Follower account – how many quality followers?
Impressions – how often your content is viewed?
Mentions – how often is your brand mentioned across social channels?
Share of Voice – how many people are talking about your brand?
- Engagement Goals – how engaged are your follower and how are they interacting with your content (Sometimes a better indicator than reach for a successful campaign)
This measures how people are:
- Taking action – to your brand.
- Likes or favourites – measures how people appreciate your content – a HUGE vanity metric.
- Comments – direct engagement with your content
- Sharing – demonstrates trust and confidence in your content
- Rates and Reviews – demonstrates strong engagement and opinion
- Inbound links to your site – an indication that your content is interesting enough to follow through to your website.
- ROI – Proof of Return on Investment – this will help you back up your message with facts and give you leverage for negotiation in renewing contracts. (Like for a bigger budget)!
- Direct sales revenue (click through and conversion)
- Lead conversions (sales funnel)
- Customer support (community management)
- Lifetime value (return buyers and users)
- Retention and Loyalty – this is centred around excellent customer service or retaining customers
- Customer reviews and ratings – this is an excellent measure of what your customers think of your brand/products
- Issues resolved – demonstrate how well you are doing in customer service
- SLA (Service level agreement) – in social terms, this measures the time frame from when the customer reached out and your response and resolution
- Time to resolution – how long does it take for a question to be answered – not just a reply, but a resolution.
- Customer Satisfaction – usually through feedback or return engagement or sales
- Sentiment – what are people think and feel about your brand – it should be positive!
REVISIT YOUR KPIs EVERY 6-12 MONTHS – not only does social media change, and fast – but your business does too!
