Social media is more relevant than ever today. Every day people are on social media for up to 3 hours. Because of this, social media is a powerful channel to communicate with and reach your audience. Once you got your content, your social media presence, but do you know how your posts are performing? The only way to know this is by looking beyond your fan count and track the right metrics, the social media Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
What is a Key Performance Indicator (KPI)?
A KPI is a type of metric that proves how a company’s social media is achieving their business goals. Companies use KPIs to evaluate how successful they are at reaching and converting their target audience.
Why are they critical for business success? Because as Peter Drucker, the famous marketing guru said: “What gets measured gets done”.
A successful KPI is one that:
- Gives evidence of progress towards a desired result
- Provides accurate data to help achieve data-driven decision making
- Helps gauging performance changes
- Have balance between lagging and leading indicators.
How to set KPIs?
Below the steps to define your KPIs:
Step #1: Set your goals
To manage using KPIs you first should know what you want to attain, what’s the successful outcome you want to achieve. This is known as setting a target (what you mean as a successful outcome) and then track progress against that target.
Before defining KPIs you need to have a clear goal defined. One way to define an effective goal is to use the SMART criteria. According to Wikipedia:
SMART is an acronym that gives a criterion in the setting of objectives as follows:
Specific – choose a specific objective
Measurable – choose a metric you can actually measure its relation towards the goal
Attainable – is the goal a realistic one?
Relevant – choose to measure a goal that is important to your company’s core business.
Time-bound – when is a realistic time to achieve this goal? Many companies expect instant results, give a realistic amount of time for your social media actions to pick up.
Step #2: Determine if there is a relation between your core business goal and a specific outcome.
First, let’s define some terminology for a better understanding of how it works:
- Target – what you expect to achieve, what is a successful outcome.
- Leading indicators – what indicator you use to predict future success. For instance, how many comments and engagement your post got.
- Lagging indicators – the present situation and indicators of past success.
For example, your specific outcome could be customer conversions. Your leading indicators could be a quantity of inquiries you get from social media. Then, your lagging indicators are the actual conversion rate.
Step #3: Choose the type of KPI that best suits your goal.
There are different categories of KPIs:
- Inputs – measures amount, type or quantity of the resources that are consumed in processes.
- Activity – measures the efficiency of a specific process in producing a defined output.
- Outputs – measures the result of the process
- Outcomes – measures the impact of the processes, for instance, customer retention or sales.
- Project – measures the status of milestone progress of a specific project.
Examples of KPIs
Metrics can be numbers or ratios. So we may have number metrics and ratio metrics.
Below are some examples of common metrics used to track performance:
- Number metrics – visits, pageviews, conversions
- Ratio metrics – bounce rate, conversion rate, ROI
Before defining KPIs you need to have a clear goal defined. One way to define an effective goal is to use the SMART criteria. According to Wikipedia:
SMART is an acronym that gives a criterion in the setting of objectives as follows:
Specific – choose a specific objective
Measurable – choose a metric you can actually measure its relation towards the goal
Attainable – is the goal a realistic one?
Relevant – choose to measure a goal that is important to your company’s core business.
Time-bound – when is a realistic time to achieve this goal? Many companies expect instant results, give a realistic amount of time for your social media actions to pick up.
Step #4: Assign a score to your KPI.
What is a KPI score?
A score is a value between 0.0 and 1.0 that represents how strong is the Actual Value of the KPI. When you set a KPI in a KPI tool, it gets assigned a score. Then you look at the metrics scorecard to know how there are faring.
What are KPI tools?
There are business reporting solutions that companies use to monitor and generate insights from KPIs. The KPIs are specific to the company’s goals and desired outcomes. All right, so far for the definition. In simple terms, KPI tools make your life easier, saving you time and money by using data analytics to assign a score to your KPIs and give you an instant picture of how your business efforts are faring.
Many social media solutions, like Uniclixapp, come with an integrated KPI tool that provides analytics on how your social media activities are achieving your goals.
How Does All This Work for Social Media?
Social media metrics have to involve the generation of traffic to your site, increasing leading generation and brand exposure. To choose what social media metrics you should use, the first thing is to keep in mind they should help measure ROI. Some questions you may ask to guide you in choosing the right metrics:
- What kind of audience are you reaching? Are you reaching qualified leads?
- Are qualified leads engaging with your brand?
- How many inquires about your product or service come from your social media fans?
- How many of the leads coming from social media become customers?
Before setting to define the best social media KPIs for your business, define your strategy.
- Define your objective – set a clear goal. Tip: Use the SMART method to help you.
- Assess your data – what data do you have? What data are you not getting from social media?
- Define what indicators measure success – choose what is an indicator of success for you.
Then choose which metrics will bring you the information you need.
What are the most important social media KPIs?
Well, that will depend mostly on what is important for your business. But in general terms, there are common areas you should focus to measure success.
#1 – Engagement
This is undoubtedly the most important area you should be concerned with in social media. Engagement is the base for all the other metrics’ success. After all, if people don’t react to your content, nothing else will happen. This includes the amount of likes, shares and comments in your social updates.
You can have a large fanbase, but if they don’t interact with your content, it is unlikely they will buy from you. This is even more important when you are on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, since the more engaged posts get served in more news feeds. In case of Twitter, the more retweets or likes your tweet gets, the larger the font it will have on your profile.
Typical engagement KPIs are:
- Clicks – the times users click on your post
- Likes – how many people likes your post
- Shares – how many times your post is shared
- Comments – actual interactions from users
- Mentions – did some users mention your company or product?
- Profile visits – how many users visited your profile?
- Active Followers – how many of your followers actively interact with your brand?
#2: Reach
It means to indicate how far your message goes. Reach, however, is only an estimate since the amount of people that saw your posts and the ones that clicked on it can be different.
Typical reach KPIs are:
- Quantity of followers or fans – how many people are following you on social media in total? This is the total number of people that may see your post.
- Impressions – how many times your post actually showed up on people’s feeds.
- Traffic data – what percentage of your traffic comes from your social media channels?
#3: Leads
Once you know how many people follow you and interact with your brand, you can go and measure how many of your fans actually want to buy from your company? Does your huge fanbase translate into sales?
If your content doesn’t generate leads, could be that you are barking at the wrong tree, namely, you are gearing it to the wrong buyer persona. Refine your customer profiling, niche down and try again. The thing is, that until you don’t stay tracking you won’t find out, so track away.
How Uniclix helps you track your KPIs efficiently
When you use Uniclixapp, all the hard work is done for you! Our Social Media Manager and Twitter booster automatically select the best KPis to track your performance. You will see everything in your dashboard.
You can see the level of engagement of your Facebook posts, shares and impressions. The software automatically tracks and presents the metrics over time, and you can choose to see how your social media strategy fares on a weekly, monthly or yearly basis. All clearly displayed on a chart right on your main dashboard. The same happens with our Twitter booster, to track the number of tweets, likes and active followers. Keep your metrics on track with UniClix. Start your free trial today.
9 Sure Ways to Grow Your Instagram Audience in 2020
Social Media Kit Template for Influencers
Boost your Marketing Strategy With Advanced Twitter Search
Creating a Social Media Content Calendar: Tips, Tricks and Templates
