Drill Tip: Selecting the Right Social Media Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Last week I talked about blog impressions as a method of measuring the performance of your digital PR outreach. However, to truly understand the full impact of your social media program you need more than just one measure. In fact, you need a set of measures known as Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
KPIs help you in many respects including aligning social media with your product or service’s natural purchase cycle. For instance, one set of social media KPIs may have measure corresponding to each of the steps a customer might take in becoming aware of, gaining interest in, learning about, and taking action toward a purchase.
The path to purchase may vary from industry to industry and from product to product. The best way to get started might be sitting down with your sales team to better understand what steps they take to convince a potential customer that the product or service is right for them.
Using the basic purchase funnel as model, you can identify the key categories and metrics that correspond to your KPIs:
Metrics can be sourced from a combination of platforms including social media measurement dashboards like Raven Tools, link-tracking sites like bit.ly or even native platform data like Facebook Insights. Ultimately, you want metrics that most closely match the actions you want to track and set a regular time interval to measure these metrics as a group.
Over time, you’ll be able to compare the performance of your metrics with specific actions taken by your team. Furthermore, by creating ratios using you metrics (i.e. reach to click-through or click-through to content consumption) you can begin to look at how efficient your team is at moving a customer through the purchase cycle.
Ultimately, multiple measures benefit not only your PR program but they instill a level of trust and accountability with your clients. The trick is to select the right KPIs that fit your purchase cycle and then not only measure them consistently but make reviewing them a part of the basic fabric of your PR program.
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