The essential KPIs for your Social Media ROI: 2. The top 20

The top 20 essential KPIs for your social media ROI

We will focus on the principle KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) that can be used to manage and monitor your Social Media Marketing strategy, and ultimately calculate your Social Media ROI.

It is important to remember that your chosen KPIs must be “actionable”, to firstly fit your digital strategy,  but also to fit your functional objectives. It seems obvious, right? For example, you might want to focus on the KPI “Growth of website audience” : Do you have a handle on (a perfect handle is rare) the essential ways that allow you to impact the reach of your audience? Managing your social media accounts, content, pages, attached blogs, SEO, sponsors etc are key to putting it further into the public eye and increasing your brand reputation. If you solely manage the social networks without putting effort into the internal links and other aforementioned web-related content, the KPI will still allow you to analyze your audience reach, that being one of your crucial objectives, but it will not allow you to truly visualise all your major objectives as a whole.

But which KPIs should I use to analyze the performance of my Social Media Marketing movements?
We are going to look at this in relation to the 5 key objectives:

1. Brand awareness
2. Customer Acquisition
3. Engagement
4. Customer Satisfaction
5. Lead Conversion

In this article, we will bring examples of the 5 objectives to life in a generic way: whether the focus is a business, a product, a brand, a model, a concept or a brand value.

Firstly, two key terms;
“Owned media” refers to the web media managed by you (your blog, your Twitter accounts etc..)
“Earned media” refers to the online conversations and web media mentioning your brand.

1. Brand Awareness

Objective : Develop the awareness of your products and brand online and on social media.

What can you do? : Invest in Facebook and Twitter Ads, promote and share certain subjects and studies to journalists, work on gaining sponsors and increasing your amount of published content.

Analyze to find out :
The level of recognition of your brand on social media.
How your audience is reacting to your content.
What the reach of your messages is and the impact of your campaigns.
What your audience reach is in comparison with your competitors.

The essential KPIs:
Mentions : Number of  re-posts and mentions of your brand on social media: shares, Re-tweets…
Impressions : Number of times where a message can be seen and impact those online, simply the total of the audience.
Reach : the potential audience of your messages and articles on social networks, blogs, and press websites = total number of individuals (meaning not duplicated) who can see the content excluding views from more than one device for example.
Visits/Traffic : Number of visits to your website, blogs on your own social media, or indeed others.
Share of Voice : most visible brands and subjects vs competitor brands and other brands of the group = X% of mentions of my brand vs other brands, % of my brand audience vs other brands (products, models).

Example : Brand reach + Evolution analysis (via Digimind Social)

KPI personalization possibilities for Brand Recognition :
Filter by country, region, town, district; or by demographic: gender, age, points of interest

2. Customer Acquisition

Objective : Broaden my target audience on social networks.

What can you do? : Enter into dialogue with fans and subscribers, newsletters, share and promote ideas, pages, articles etc, create competitions and giveaways, make content attractive and targeted, invest in advertising.

Analyze to find out :
The importance of your online community on different social media.
The growth of your online community over different social channels.
Your shares of voice in “owned media” vs those of your competitors channels.

The essential KPIs:
Online community performance : Number of fans, followers, subscribers per social channel.
Growth of online community : Growth rate of fans and followers on media platforms.
Shares per channel : % of online base for each social media  brought together as a total.
Shares of Voice within your audience base : Number of fans, followers, subscribers compared to your competitors.
Visits/Traffic : Analyze the number of views on your website(s) and blog(s) generated via social media.

Community growth per media (via Digimind Social)

KPI personalization possibilities for Customer Acquisition:
Filter by country, contributor type, demographics: gender, age, points of interest (type of online community).

3. Engagement

Objectives : Build relationships and demand among your target audiences and your brand(s), develop the amount of ambassadors.

What can you do? :
Push high quality content, newsjacking, promote your employment brand, boost the visibility fan base posts and comments, assess your marketing influence, detection and ambassador relations.

Analyze to find out :
The links and interactions with your audience and your online communities.

The essential KPIs:
Engagement Performance : Number of interactions (Favourited likes, retweets, shares, re-pins…), number of comments.
Engagement development: Growth rate of interactions.
Publication Performance: Number of messages generated from interactions > “x “ [to be defined according to the objectives], rate of engagement by publication.

Analysis of publications obtaining the highest engagement (via Digimind Social)

Not forgetting :
Hashtag Performance : number and growth statistics of hashtags citing your brand, related to your brand, number of official re-posts of your campaign(s)/event(s) hashtags.
Influencer Population: Number of new influencers – ambassadeurs.  % of the targeted community.
Influencer Performance : Influence Score of your fans and subscribers.

These KPIs can be analyzed using qualitative criteria such as the status of the new influencers for example.

KPI personalization possibilities for Engagement :
Filter by country, contributeur type, demographics; gender, age, points of interest (type of online community)

4. Customer Satisfaction

Objectives : Improve the perception of your brand, but equally the overall satisfaction from its products and services.

What can you do? :
Create client case studies, work to respond better to customer support queries on social media networks, improve response rates, communicate on innovations, discuss customer experiences.

Analyze to find out :
The perception of your brand, products and actions held among your consumers and online users.

The essential KPIs :
Brand perception : Feelings associated with your brand, % of positive messages compared to those of competitors perceptions.
Perception development : Growth rate of positive feelings associated with your brand.
Reputation Score: Feelings associated with your brand expressed in Share of Voice.
Response Performance : Rate of response to demands and requests on social networks.
Customer Service Performance : Number of customer support issues resolved within a given period, increase or improvement in the number of support issues resolved within a given period.

KPI personalization possibilities for Satisfaction :
Filter by types of online users, clients and industries.

Comparison of feelings associated with my brands vs concurrents (via Digimind Social)

5. Lead Conversion

Objective :
Converting social media leads into quality business sales leads.

What can you do? :
Push targeted and high quality content, PR influencers and ambassadors, offer free trials or product samples, hold conferences…

Analyze to find out :
What percentage of leads are originating from social media? (sponsored messages or organic).

The essential KPIs :
Number of leads coming from social media channels within a given period: Share of marketing leads (originally only on social media, blogs etc) transformed into reputable business leads and integrated into the CRM platform.

Growth of leads coming from Social Media : Monthly growth rate of lead conversions from Social Media to Sales.

KPI personalization possibilities for Social Media Conversion:
Filter by country, industry, account type.

An integrated Social Media contact as a lead in the CRM

It’s now down to you to decide which are your top priority KPIs (those which will have the most impact on your objectives), but that will also be useful in analyzing your Social Media workflow.
In our next blog post, we will look at how to construct a dynamic and interactive Social Media KPI Dashboard.

Interested by the KPIs we’ve mentioned in the article? Get your demo with Digimind Social!