Social media is brilliant for achieving a wide range of business objectives. You can use it as a tool to discuss important topics with your followers and customers/clients, to build awareness about your business activities and of course to enable your business make direct sales. But you could also very easily get lost in its unassuming abyss of complexity if you don’t have the right knowledge and expertise to guide you in setting SMART objectives and determining your KPIs.

For our purposes, a KPI (key performance indicator) is defined as a value that helps to measure how effective a campaign is in helping a business achieve its key business objectives. This makes KPIs incredibly important to the success of a business. Selecting KPIs often means choosing a couple of metrics out of literally hundreds and that can be a daunting task if you don’t know what they mean and what to look out for. Here are a few things to consider.

Figure out what truly matters first, and then measure it.

Finding out what matters may be tough, draining and time-consuming but it’s totally worth the effort. It ensures that your online communication and growth are in sync with your overall company values and objectives. It also allows you to break loose from the pursuit of vain yet glamorous metrics that won’t help move the needle on your business. Begin by taking a critical look at your current performance measuring process, if you have one. Look at what your business objectives are and how your digital marketing KPIs feed into that or provide insight into what you can do to directly achieve your specific objectives. If you find little to zero correlation, sorry but you’ve just spent your time and money chasing the wind. For example, if you have an e-commerce and looking to drive sales online, measuring your campaign success solely on the basis of page or post likes isn’t as impactful as website clicks.  If you don’t already have an online presence or performance measuring process in place, don’t worry, you can hit us up right here to get you on your way. Without a good understanding of social media metrics and their impact on your broad business objectives, you’re going nowhere online!

 

Pick the indicators that best measure what matters

The KPIs you pick must be closely aligned to activities that you consider valuable to achieving your campaign objectives, e.g. how it impacts a customer’s journey through your sales funnel. For instance: if you are a business that is trying to increase awareness for a new product, KPIs such as post reach (and their demographics), website visits, shares and comments (enquiries and feedback) would be good indicators of how far your content is going, who is taking what action on your content and how well they are receiving your content. It’s great to see your post garnering thousands of likes but how many of those social media users have actually taken in the message you want to convey and are taking actions that will bring in the value. Check out our article on how to pimp your ROI as a business. The big takeaway is that, once you know what matters and the best way to measure it, you can build an appropriate strategy to achieve your goals.

Measure and analyse what matters

What’s the point in going through the two steps above to generate a report with no action beyond that? Just another item to hand over to the auditors so that you have proof that you used company funds for what they were assigned for? No, sir! KPIs need to be situated within a proper context. Essentially, analysing KPI results helps to predict future campaign performance based on current trends and also improves current processes. As we said before, once you know what matters and the best way to measure what matters, you can build an appropriate strategy to achieve your goals. The next step, which will be our takeaway from this final component is: once you can effectively analyse the performance of your strategy, you will know where to tighten or loosen things up to increase the value generated to your business and audience.

These are three basic things to consider when picking KPIs for your social media campaign online but as gurus in this space with an insane amount of intel, you can hit us up so that together, we can dive deeper into your business objectives to customise your online experience to help you achieve true value for your business.

Remember, every KPI/metric is of equal importance however, how they are applied or prioritised in a particular situation makes the difference. Talk to the experts today!

Jonathan is a self-proclaimed “words and numbers guy” with a degree in Engineering and masters in Development Finance. Mix that with his word play and that’s what he applies to demystify products for consumers and insights to businesses.