When training for a marathon, you wouldn’t just run around the park a few times and hope for the best. Success requires planning and meticulous execution making it essential to set goals and track your progress on a regular basis. The same concept applies to business. Flapping around aimlessly won’t do you any favours – which is why it’s good to monitor organisational objectives via KPIs. So did you set your social media KPIs?

What Are KPIs And Why Do We Need Them?

You’ll know by now that many business terms are abbreviated; this can make them sound cool and hip or rather scary depending on your outlook. The main thing you need to know, however, is that KPIs aren’t as worrying as they may seem – in fact they’re rather handy.

KPIs or Key Performance Indicators are used to measure your performance against key business objectives. While high-level KPIs may focus on the overall performance of your company as a whole, low-level KPIs delve a little deeper into the processes of individual departments helping to make sense of everything from content to social media strategies.

Essentially, we need KPIs to keep businesses on track. Ideas are one thing, but if they don’t result in leads it may be wise to try a different approach – and without certain data and metrics it can be really tricky to see what’s working and what’s not.

Be SMART With Your Social Media KPIs

Setting realistic KPIs that everyone understands is an important part of business. Get this wrong from the off and it will be like fumbling around in the dark looking for the light switch. One way to keep on the straight and narrow is to use the SMARTER criteria. The letters which make up the word ‘SMARTER’ stand for: specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, time-bound, evaluate and re-evaluate.

S – Is your objective Specific?

M – Can you accurately Measure the progress of a particular campaign?

A – Is the goal Attainable?

R – Is the overall goal Relevant to your organisation?

T – Have you thought about a time-frame for the KPI?

E – Can you Evaluate your objectives?

R – Can you Re-evaluate your objectives?

Social Media KPIS – Things To Consider

When defining a KPI there are many important questions you have to ask to ensure you follow up on key business objectives in an organised and professional way.

These include:

• What is your desired outcome? You can use past data to make an estimate if you’re not sure, or analyse the success of previous campaigns outside of your company.
• How are you going to measure progress? Understanding analytical tools is vital here.
• How can you influence the outcome to achieve what you want to achieve?
• How will you know if you’ve achieved what you want to? What will you do next?
• How/which department is responsible for the business outcome?
• How often will you review your progress towards the outcome?

When putting together an analysis strategy it’s really important for social media managers and CMOs to agree KPIs together so that everyone’s on the same page. This will help to prevent future issues such as reporting errors or content marketing mistakes that could be time-consuming and costly.

Measuring Social Media KPIs

Social media is an effective tool for businesses. It can be used to enhance brand awareness, engage with customers, promote products, improve your online reputation and drive traffic to specific landing pages – but in order to use social media correctly, you must set specific goals and measure the associated KPIs. The tools you use to analyse performance will depend on the KPI in question, so here are a few examples.

• Twitter Engagement

If one of your KPIs is to increase Twitter interaction within a given timeframe by say, upping the content you share or using a particular hash tag to promote a campaign, you might want to use the Twitter Engagement metric. This measures the effectiveness of your tweets by tracking everything from retweets to company mentions.

As sharing content is often perceived as a positive sign that people are actively engaging with your content, you may also be interested in Social Shares which indicates how popular your posts are as well as the total reach of your content.

• Facebook Ads Campaign Performance

Similarly, if you aim to increase conversion to your website through an ad placed on Facebook, you can use the Facebook Ads Campaign Performance metric to see how well your ad is doing. This tool provides data regarding ad spend, conversions, cost per conversion and conversion trend. You can also track your campaign alongside your budget allowing you to make adjustments as you go if necessary.

Social media revolves around creating strong content that’ll generate interest and result in leads. Setting KPIs and monitoring all social campaigns is a learning curve and one that’ll help you see what you’re doing well and what you can improve upon. Analytics will also allow you to make speedy decisions and is well worth pursuing.

Want the experts to manage your social media channels in 2021? Chat to the Contentworks team now about finding the right managed solution for your brand.