How can you identify the right social media KPIs?

Also your goals should reflect on your capabilities. Do not overcommit if you do not have enough Time - Budget - Knowledge. Know what are your limitations so that can help to find the best KPIs.

Before diving into the world of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), it's crucial to establish clear social media goals. Ask yourself, what do you aim to achieve with your social media strategy? Is it boosting brand awareness, generating leads, driving sales, or enhancing customer satisfaction? To ensure your goals are effective, make them SMART—Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. For instance, a SMART goal might be: "Increase website traffic from Facebook by 20% in the next quarter." Setting these well-defined goals provides the roadmap for selecting the right KPIs and charting your path to social media success.

I discovered the value of aligning OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) with our overarching marketing goals and synchronizing social media KPIs with these OKRs. OKRs should be ambitious yet achievable, and they should be regularly reviewed and adjusted as needed to stay aligned with your marketing goal.

Knowing your goals is essential for evaluating which KPIs to track. Make sure that when you select your KPIs, you align them to your social media as well as your social media goals, as well as your overarching marketing goals. For example, if you are looking to grow brand awareness, track impressions and audience growth. If you're looking to increase consideration, I would suggest tracking engagements.

For most brands with a funnel which leads to checkouts on a website, the focus of social goals will be conversion and website traffic. At different stages of the funnel, goals will shift towards brand awareness (engagement, following), but ultimately, it's the ROI that counts.

Each social platform should measured with different KPI. For example do not expect high click-through on Instagram posts, as there the engagement rate is more relevant. But expect nice lead number from LinkedIn and do not set low CPC expectations here. All platforms has their "special power".

SMART goals provide the roadmap for your business strategy, but measuring progress is equally critical. Enter Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). These KPIs are the compass guiding your journey, helping you evaluate how effectively you're meeting your SMART goals. To do this, you must choose KPIs that are relevant, actionable, and measurable. For example, if your SMART goal is to increase website traffic from Facebook, relevant KPIs include the number of clicks, click-through rate, bounce rate, and average session duration. These KPIs allow you to track your progress, make informed decisions, and fine-tune your strategy for optimal success. Remember, setting SMART goals is the first step, but aligning them with the right

Mapping KPIs to your goals is like connecting the dots between what you want to achieve and how you measure success. Start by clarifying your objectives, whether it's boosting brand awareness, driving website traffic, or increasing sales. Once you've got your goals in focus, choose specific KPIs that directly reflect those objectives. For instance, if it's about brand awareness, metrics like impressions and reach make sense. If sales are the goal, track metrics like conversion rate and revenue. It's all about ensuring your KPIs align closely with your goals, helping you stay on the path towards achieving them. Regularly reviewing and adjusting this connection keeps your strategy effective and your efforts focused.

Each KPI has a different role to play in adding value to the overall business goal. For example, if a brand wants to focus on letting more and more people to know about their new product (increase the product awareness) , then the right KPI will be Reach. Having said that, it is important to define the target audience so that you introduce your brand only to relevant people. This will increase the chances of conversions.

Consistency is key. It’s important to identify which KPI’s are most related towards your goals and to agree on consistent reporting, whether that be weekly, monthly or quarterly. Don’t expect quick results. It takes time to find trends in your data, to be able to test variables and compare performance. Stick with it and you’ll reap the rewards!

While common KPIs are great starting points, it's essential to delve deeper into metrics that cater specifically to your brand's unique needs. Sometimes, niche-specific KPIs, like forum engagement or industry-specific mentions, can be more enlightening than broader ones.

Social media KPIs can vary based on platform. The most common KPI's to analyze for an increase or decrease in: - Impressions / Views (Reach) - Engagement Rate (% of Likes, Comments, Shares) - Followers (Growth) - Web Visitors by Channel Source - Traffic Conversions (Leads Generated) To set these KPI's you must analyze your competitors within your industry to set realistic goals while ensuring your KPIs are aligned and impacting your overall goals or OKRs (Objectives and Key Results).

⚡️There are so many KPIs on Social and Paid media marketing. Based on your goals your KPIs will be different. i,e For the upper funnel brand awareness KPIs are - Impressions, Reach, Engagement rate, and CTR & traffic. 🎯 For Paid media main kpi's are Conversions, Cpc, CTR, Cpm, and ROAS etc.. It will always depend on your campaign goal. From the KPI you can analyse how is your campaign performing. 💫 You should have a threshold. Also, There is always an industry benchmark available on the internet. It will help you to have an initial comparison of the performances. Analyse your KPIs to optimize your campaigns and make data-driven decisions to achieve your marketing objectives effectively. ✨

Do NOT overmeasure either. Choose the right 3-5 KPIs that really make contribution to your business goals. Measuring all what is measurable could lead to confusion and loss of focus.

Ah yes, the minefield that is social media KPIs. We all know that different social media platforms will have different kinds of metrics. But they also have quite a few in common: - Reach - Likes - Comments - Saves (mostly for Tiktok and Instagram) - Reshares/reposts - Engagement rate Make sure to research your platforms in detail to find out how they measure content performance and understand what metrics you need to be tracking.

Have a consistent strategy and set up: - monthly - quarterly - yearly reporting. Having continuous measurement can help to act in time and better optimise your activity as well as manage expectations.

KPI tracking isn't a 'set it and forget it' task. The digital landscape evolves constantly, meaning what's relevant today might not be tomorrow. Regularly revisiting and adjusting your tracking methods ensures you're always getting data that matters.

After setting your goals and initiating the action plan to achieve them, it's important to monitor the results and compare them to the objectives you've set. This allows you to make necessary adjustments to your actions and approach. For instance, if you're running a campaign targeting people aged 20 to 30, but your reports show that you're reaching people aged 25 to 35, it's essential to analyze what caused this discrepancy. You may need to modify elements such as the message, tone, or offer to better align with your intended audience.

Adding written context to your KPI reporting colors the metrics and tells a story that data alone often cannot. Stats down this month across the board? Maybe it's because there was an in-person event the month prior, which generated an abnormally high output. Without adding the written context, reports become a jumble of numbers - especially when you are looking at metrics pulled 6, 12, 24 months prior. Add your context to the data and tell the WHOLE story - it will benefit you and your stakeholders in the long run.

To measure and monitor your KPIs, you should first define your objectives, strategies, and actions to achieve your KPIs. Then, implement your plan and collect data and feedback. Afterwards, analyze the data and results to compare them with your KPIs and expectations.

Do not forget: only test one thing at a time! That should be a new image to the old message, a new headline to an old page or a different call to action in a running ad. But do not change too much or too frequently!

Starting on social media can be overwhelming. It's important to learn about your audience and what works for them on each platform. Different platforms have different audiences and react differently, so what works on one platform may not work on another. Optimize your content by choosing the right platforms for each content type. Keep up with industry trends and avoid jumping into different trends if they don't align with your brand objectives and your audience's interests. Optimize your keywords, hashtags, content, profile, brand identity, and posting frequency to increase engagement, followers, and conversions. Stay up-to-date on best practices and trends to create a successful social media strategy that resonates with your audience.

If you're not analysing your social media data, you'll struggle to grow your community. Simple as that. That said, the Internet is FULL of advice telling you what you should and shouldn't be doing when it comes to analysing your metrics. Let me break it down for you... 1. Analyse your content monthly and quarterly. 2. Have a spreadsheet that covers your overall metrics (follower growth, average reach, average engagement rate etc) and a spreadsheet that covers each individual post. Then you'll want to look at the data covering each individual post. - What content has performed well this month? What do these posts have in common (other than the topic!) - What content didn't do so well this month? Why might this be the case?

I've always separated content for engagement and content for conversion. Conversion in consumers are hooked to urgency, value and offer - you can place ads that increases repeated exposure and drive customers through the funnel that way. But content for engagement doesn't even necessarily mention your brand or product. It only exudes your brand personality and create opportunities for conversations with a wider audience. Your purpose is to entertain, to educate, to engage emotions. One cannot do without the other, but which to lean on depends on your most immediate goal - building brand awareness or chasing conversion.

Harnessing KPIs isn't just about passive observation; it's about actively adapting. It's akin to a feedback loop where the insights derived from past campaigns fuel the strategies of the next. By staying nimble and open to change, your social media endeavors remain ever-evolving, dynamic, and responsive to your audience's needs.

At the end of the day, remember that KPIs are just that: indicators. They may indicate performance, but they aren't a guarantee. If your content is delivering against your KPIs but something doesn't feel right, listen to your gut! A lot of reach and engagement, for example, could just mean you're creating a lot of meme content that might not bring true brand awareness to your audience. Use your KPIs to keep a high-level measure of success and demonstrate the power of social media, but don't forget to consider your goals from a more holistic mindset as well.

Social media has scale challenges to tracking data by its very nature. Huge volumes of content means bigger data sets to analyze. Multiple accounts mean bugger data sets to analyze. All of this adds up to time, and most creators don't have it. This is why many creators and social media managers rely on gut feelings and direct feedback from a small set of audience members, rather than adopting a data driven content strategy that can help them grow more quickly. Social strategists and creators need to work smarter, not harder. They can double down on the content that is working by the numbers, and get bigger viewership and engagement with fewer pieces of content.

While defining your KPIs it is common to make the mistake of forgetting about the bigger picture and what matters the most: your customer. Understading the full user journey, their pain points as well as how to best reach them at the right time,in the right context and with a valuable message via the right attribution model and MMM is what really makes the difference. It is easy to get lost in vanity metrics if you do not observe how they paint the bigger picture and whether they are movig the needle towards your overall growth targets. Clicks, impressions, likes as siloed measurements mean nothing in the context of a customer that needs to be retained in the long term through the timely and repeated experience of core product value.

Each social media platform has its own purpose and there are unwritten rules about how to engage with your customers on each platform. The one unwritten rule that is most overlooked is that it's okay to break the rules. In fact, it can be massively advantageous to do so. For example, we're all familiar with retargeting ads on Facebook and Instagram for a top or a pair of shoes we thought about buying. I have never seen those retargeting ads on LinkedIn's social media platform, but that doesn't mean they don't belong there. In fact, it may be an opportunity. Some will say that those ads are intrusive on a social media platform where people go to network, but I'd recommend running a test. What do you have to lose?

Take into consideration that not everything that points to the success of social media shows up in the most common social media KPIs (impressions, engagement, etc). For instance, you can find that notes in your CRM from a potential lead for your sales department state that they came in from a specific social media platform, campaign, or post. While that won't show up in your basic KPIs (and may not even show up in your tracking—if it doesn't, try working on that with your MOPs dept.), it's still important to keep track of. Creating a deck of your wins to go alongside your metrics spreadsheet is a great way to make sure you're tracking the value of your role.