Social media KPIs
I’ve talked a lot on this blog about the importance of social media analytics for optimizing your social media campaigns. But, what should you measure? Unlike traditional media, social media suffers from TOO MUCH data and you could spend your entire day trying to make sense out of all this data and trying to use it to guide decision-making.
Well, the answer is that you use social media KPIs to assess the success of your social media marketing campaigns, tweak the campaigns to optimize your social media marketing strategy, and justify expenses by calculating the ROI of your social media marketing strategy.
Social media KPIs or Key Performance Indicators of your social media marketing campaign are just what they sound like — metrics that reflect how your social media impacts aspects of your business that lead to market performance (commonly sales and the factors leading up to sales).
Types of social media KPI
But, don’t take my word for it. Here’s a list of 6 types of social media KPIs to monitor courtesy of Search Engine Watch. Notice these 6 social media KPIs look similar to the social media hierarchy of effects I developed a couple of years ago and is shown above. Reflected in both the graphic and the list developed by Search Engine Watch is the reality that ROI is only the BOTTOM of a long process. A singular focus on sales often leads to decisions that marginalize the early brand associations necessary for increasing sales. For more details on creating a strategy encompassing the entire sales funnel, see my recent post on See, Think, Do.
As an example, as part of the research for my social media analytics book (BTW, you can grab part of the book FREE), a number of top social media analytics software tools have provided demos of their applications and case studies showing the value of their software. I approached Adobe, who’s Omniture software is heavily used by enterprise-level businesses, for a demo. They declined to provide a demo, stating that they only provide demos when there is a sales opportunity. Are you kidding me?????? Maybe I won’t buy their software, but my review (assuming their software is as good as they say it is) might influence any number of people to consider Adobe software. Pretty stupid!
And, if you’re primarily interested in ROI, as your key metric, here’s some advice on calculating the ever-slippery ROI. This list includes items directly contributing to sales, such as conversion, and elements building to sales, such as CTR. This list of social media KPIs is housed on List.ly. You can add to the list (please do) and vote up items on the list you think deserve more attention.
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Unfortunatelly all of these KPI fail when your manager asks you for showing the imact of social media on revenues.
Not necessarily. You can set a KPI for sales — you just need to have additional KPI’s that map to actions leading up to sales. For instance, visiting the FAQ or a review page might arguably lead to sales. The important issue is that you can’t always impact sales directly. You have to work on sales THROUGH those actions that lead to sales.