What are your social media KPIs?

Actually, I agree with this. Before starting out any social media campaign, you need to have clear goals and objectives and set KPIs that align with overall business goals. There are different social media goals such as brand awareness, engagement, increase web traffic, manage brand reputation, boost conversion or sales among others. For instance, if your goal is generate leads, you have to track metrics such as conversion, click through rate and cost per lead

As of this year, 2023, there's been a pretty dramatic shift in focus to top-funnel objectives (ie awareness) over trying to overwhelm followers with ads and CTAs (ie conversion), so right off the bat reach, impressions, and followers are all good measures. Consider the communities you have or are trying to tap, what's their propensity to engage? How much awareness do they exhibit around your brand? Their first introduction to your brand shouldn't be a hard sell ad, who wants to come back to that?

One of the most crucial stages in aligning KPIs with campaign objectives and having the appropriate measurement setup, tools, and methodologies in place to track campaign success. When it comes to KPIs, the thought process should be to measure tangible KPIs that demonstrate improvement in business outcomes rather than simply a few cosmetic metrics.

Choosing and tracking social media KPIs is a complex process, but it is essential for measuring the success of your social media marketing strategy. The first step is to ensure that your KPIs are aligned with your overall business goals. What are you trying to achieve with your social media marketing? Are you trying to increase brand awareness, generate leads, or drive sales? Once you know your goals, you can choose KPIs that will measure your progress towards them.

There are some important metrics that are divided into different categories: Engagement Metrics (Likes/Reactions,Comments,Shares/Retweets ,...) Follower Growth, Reach and Impressions, Conversion Metrics (Clicks to Website, Conversion Rate), Brand Awareness, Customer Support (Response TimeResolution Rate), Content Performance, Sentiment Analysis, Social Share of Voice(Share of Conversations) and Customer Satisfaction (NPS).

When talking about KPIs, there is one thing that must be considered, the similarity of expectations between company & marketing/socmed team. Sometimes companies want visible numbers starting from followers, or numbers can contribute to sales. In fact, the main influence of social media is as a tool for how our company want to be known. Social media is the company's front line in informing, educating, communicating, and connecting with customers. A large number of followers doesn't mean anything if we can't connect with customers. In the past few years, I've looked at what metrics actually make social media look impactful. I found that social media content brings profile visits, engagements, link clicks and it’s different for every channel.

After you have established your marcomms objective that is tightly aligned with the business objective, and identified the platform and campaign type, then you are in a good place to choose the right KPIs to measure against. Choosing KPIs without a clear objective and alignment with the business might not set you and your teams up for success.

Depends on your role here, community managers will look to likes, comments, shares, the gold standard in owned media. I come from the analytics and earned side, so in social listening that looks very similar. Total mentions, original mentions, engagement, users, competitor SOV, category SOV, top sources, sentiment distribution. These are the golden KPIs for me and the work well no matter what brand you are, or type of business (B2B and B2C).

Prioritise KPIs that match your business stage and/or objectives. For instance, early stage startups might measure followers and subscribers as a way to track brand awareness. For more established businesses, downloads, shares and enquiries would be a better way to monitor lead generation. It’s not enough to just track KPIs. Answer the “so what” question. What do the stats imply about your next steps? Continue, change or stop?

A mentor of mine always stressed the importance of understanding the intel/implications of the data, not simply whether or not the numbers were ‘up’, and was always looking for the ‘why’ ( before Simon Sinek ) behind any changes or shifts. Thank you for sharing your perspective.

This is pretty easy for your brand, you'll have historical access to your owned performance. And even if you didn't, you can usually backfill your owned data in 3P tools. In social listening historical data is a major issue. Most tools work off a rolling basis, so each day you lose access to another day's worth of data on the tail end of your listening period. Capturing data and benchmarking your brand is harder in earned (for any source) so definitely prioritize that. Owned is almost always easier to backfill.

Without data, it’s just a guessing game. Tracking your KPIs is a no-brainer and if you aren’t keeping track of your metrics and documenting that data, now is the time to do it.

Monitorar e acompanhar os KPIs são essências nas estratégias de conteúdo, pois auxilia na tomada de decisão e a saber como a estratégia e conteúdo estão performando. Por conta disso, é essencial fazer esse monitoramento constante, seja com ferramentas disponíveis no mercado ou por sua conta, por meio de uma planilha do Excel. Esse acompanhamento é valioso para após 6 meses ou 1 ano, por exemplo, você ver a evolução da sua marca e comparar com períodos anteriores, ajudando na sua decisão final.

Social Media Listening provides real-time insights while also offering the capability to explore historical data related to your brand and audience perception. Is their experience positive or negative? What aspects of your brand are worth improving? Are any crisis situations impacting your brand? In this way, basic social media listening metrics directly contribute to KPIs focused on customer satisfaction and retention.

Nur wer regelmäßig seine Performance analysiert und Handlungsempfehlungen ableitet, kann seine Social Media Strategie effektiv optimieren. Ich kann jedem nur empfehlen, sich ein Dashboard einzurichten, welches die wichtigsten KPIs misst.

On paper, a c-suite executive may not care what your customer is saying on social, but it can be used to inform future creative to help achieve your goals throughout the funnel. For instance, you just shared a new reward available for cardmembers (retention). A cardmember then shared their story of how they utilized their reward, which turned into a story on unique ways to utilize card rewards (consideration) that results in new card sign ups. All from taking the time to learn from your community.

Yep, and again I'll offer the social listeners POV. Replies, sentiment, key themes, known entities, and other lexical/qualitative data can be extremely useful. And there's no other way to replicate it either, that's the beauty of social. It's all raw feedback in an uncontrollable environment. Hard to get to but invaluable when you do.

Sentiments, net promoter score, share of voice loyalty and advocacy are some of the quality metrics when doing social media listening for your brand.

Oft unterschätzt wird die Qualität der Kommentare unter einem Beitrag. Außerdem werden auch einzelne KPIs häufiger unterschätzt, denn Shares sind mittlerweile deutlich wertvoller als Likes oder Kommentare.

By examining audience feedback and their attitude, you can fine-tune your KPIs to align with evolving objectives. For instance, if sentiment trends towards dissatisfaction, it signals that you need to review strategies before they affect KPIs such as customer satisfaction and retention, which were mentioned above.

Through the evolution of brand's social page, KPI's keep evolving as well. Either based on the growth of the brand in the market as well as the maturity of the social page. Not only do I recommend a review every quarter but also at every business milestone achieved.

Don't get fixated on improving any single social media metric. Because metrics can be gamed or manipulated artificially, sometimes in ways that can damage your brand. Also, improvements in some metrics sometimes come at the cost of losses in other metrics. So remember the big picture.

Challenges of choosing and tracking social media KPIs. Choosing and tracking social media KPIs can be challenging. Here are a few of the challenges: Data noise: It can be difficult to filter out data noise, such as bot traffic and fake engagement. Setting realistic expectations: It takes time to see results from social media marketing. It's important to set realistic expectations and not expect overnight success.