Social media analytics is the key to success in Social Media marketing. Without a way to make sense of all the data collected you won’t be able get any actionable insights.
But, the question arises, what kind of data should you collect? What should you measure? There are numerous key performance indicators (KPIs) that you should measure anytime you are running a social media marketing campaign. Social media KPIs are values used by social media marketing professionals to measure the performance of social media campaigns.
In this article we have categorized the KPIs you should measure into five broad categories; distribution, interaction, influence, action and internal KPIs.
Before, we get into the KPIs, it’s important to mention that you should set a baseline and then record the rate of change as you conduct your campaign.
So, let’s get right into it.
Distribution KPIs
Distribution KPIs are all about the social media networks you are using to get your message out. These KPIs should tell you if you message is effectively being heard and whether the audience is large enough to justify your marketing budget.
1. Blog subscribers
2. Fans
3. Followers
4. Inbound links
5. Number of mentions
6. Reach
7. Social bookmarks (StumbleUpon, Delicious)
Interaction KPIs
The next set of KPIs are interaction based. These tell your much your audience is engaging with your content. These KPIs include:
8. Comments
9. Contributors and active contributors
10. Forwards
11. Like or rate something
12. Pageviews
13. Response time
14. Retweets
15. Reviews
16. Shares
17. Time spent on site
18. Traffic from social networking sites
19. Unique visitors
Important Note
At this juncture, it is important to pause a little and discuss an important metric known as conversion rate. The conversion rate is derived from distribution and interaction KPIs. It is arrived at by taking the number of interactions and diving this by the reach and, expressing this as a percentage.
Influence KPIs
Influence KPIs measure how audience attitudes change as a result of your social media efforts. In other words, influence KPIs measure your brand value. They are more qualitative as opposed to quantitative. Some of the KPIs you should measure include:
20. Net Promoter Score
21. Number of brand evangelists and micro-influencers
22. Satisfaction
23. Sentiment positive, neutral or negative
24. Share of conversation vs competitors
Action KPIs
Also known return on investment KPIs, these KPIs measure the impact of your social media efforts to your bottom line. This is where the rubber meets the road. These KPIs have historically been difficult to measure with respect to social media which has led many social media skeptics to wrongly claim there is no correlation between social media marketing and the bottom line. These KPIs provide this information they include:
25. Conversions (email subscriptions, downloads, install widget or tool, etc)
26. Cost of lead
27. Cost of sale
28. Issues resolved and resolution rate
29. Lead conversion rate
30. Lifetime value of customers
31. Net profit
32. Number of leads (per day, week, month)
33. Registered users
34. Revenue (per follower, lead, customer)
35. Sales revenue
36. Share of repeat customers (from social media vs other channels)
37. Support cost (per customer in social channels)
38. Transaction value per customer
Internal KPIs
Finally, we have internal KPIs. This is the raw output from your social media marketing team. It is important to measure these to find out if you are fully utilizing your human resources. These will inform you whether you need to make staffing changes and whether to increase/decrease the work load. Some of the KPIs you should measure per marketing employee includes:
39. Blog posts
40. E-books
41. Facebook updates
42. Forum posts
43. Presentations
44. Social media development costs
45. Social media marketing budget
46. Social media staff payroll
47. Tweets
48. Videos
Conclusion
As mentioned before, the way to get the most out of these KPIs is to have a baseline before you start. This helps you track your progress throughout your campaign. Once you have the KPIs results, benchmark these against your competition. Competitor information can be obtained from a number of sources such as industry bulletins, research websites, government statistics or from your research.
