KPIs in social media: which should be tracked when managing social media? Let’s try to figure it out.

There is a fairly obvious general rule:

You need to track the achievement of the result that you want to achieve, as well as the achievement of intermediate success on the way to its achievement.

It sounds quite clear, but as a rule, the main stupor occurs at the stage ‘and what do we want to achieve from social media’?

To deal with this, you should recall the ‘customer journey’ – what place social media takes in all your digital marketing and in the path of the client. There are a lot of options, but let’s try to deal with the main ones:

Are we going to use social media as a communication channel with our potential/existing customers? With our potential employees?

If the answer is yes, then it’s pretty obvious that you probably want your subscriptions to grow. At the same time, you don’t need “bots”, i.e. just a fake user trick to increase the number of subscribers.

Most likely, you are even very interested in having your subscribers grow with people of certain interests or even groups, and this can best be achieved with the help of paid promotion tools in social media.

This way, your KPIs will be:

  • The number of group/page/account subscribers attracted during certain period with a certain targeting (cities, interests, behaviors) – in order to maximize this indicator
  • The cost of attracting one such targeted subscriber – in order to minimize this indicator

Next question:

Do we attract visitors with certain targeting to our site to collect requests from them or do we actually sell them something by e-commerce?

Probably, yes.

In this case KPI may be:

  • The number of targeted visitors attracted to the site through social media (maximizing)
  • The cost of such a visitor (minimize – in order to achieve better performance than other channels, in particular Adwords or Direct).
  • The cost of a lead from such visitors or cost of the good put in the cart in the case of an online store (minimize)

Remember, whem doing this – you need only the targeted visitors. Who are they? How you define your potential client? The empathy map will help you with that.

And finally we come to the most important moment:

Should I track some KPIs in social media regarding the actual sales?

That is, their quantity and cost per sale? On the one hand we would like to!

But on the other hand, there are many factors that are important for the sales that may lie outside the influence of your social media manager or the social media agency you hired.

We believe that sales can be tracked as the social media KPI in the case if the one who is engaged in social media also can actively influence the site, its design, catalog, the work of the sales team (depending on how the sales process is arranged).

At least, if there is a successful history of sales through other digital channels, such as advertising in the search engine, you can set sales-related goals for social media person, understanding that once the sales work through other digital channels, and social media should also produce sales.

If such influence on sales is not present in the social media person’s job and there is no history of sales from other digital channels – it is senseless to set sales-related goals to social media person/team/agency.

Social media can give you targeted visits to the site, but if you have a boring content there, or bad deals, or wrong pricing – no one will buy.

But it won’t be the social media person that’s to blame.

Or if leads are submitted on the site, and no one picks them up on the side of the company – why blame social media person? You first need to set up the work within the company to process potential customers, rather than press the social media with ‘where are the sales?’