Whenever you create your social media pages, you need to know how they are performing in different aspects. That’s how Key Performance Indicators were born – to tell you how you are doing and what you can improve.
If you haven’t heard about KPIs before, they are a measurable value that demonstrates how effectively a company is achieving key business objectives. Organizations use KPIs at multiple levels to evaluate their success at reaching targets. High-level KPIs may focus on the overall performance of the business, while low-level KPIs may focus on processes in departments such as sales, marketing, HR, support, and others.
There are various Key Performance Indicators that you should keep in mind; for us, these are the most important:
- Reach and Number of Impressions: These two indicators will tell you how many people are watching your post or going to your page. We currently see reach and impressions as the most important of generating attraction to your page – it is important to keep these numbers up because once a person is attracted to your page, you will be able to keep them coming back depending on your content.
When it comes to this KPI, you can do social media ads in order to get people to land on your social media page, or even talk about the page in your personal profile in order to make people interested.
- Engagement: This KPI is all about your content. When you create good and interactive content, you will have your audience liking your posts, interacting with your stories, answering your questions, and more.
As we have said before, engagement is all about creating an interesting post. Ask yourself, what would your audience find interesting or how can you create out-of-the-box content? Once you engage with them, they will keep going back to your post and interacting with you.
- Profile Visits and Clicks: These two are achieved once your audience gets to the end of the funnel. If you have achieved the other three KPIs (reach, impressions, and engagement) you can make them go back to your profile and click on the link in your bio.
For us, it is all about getting your customers to the end of a funnel by measuring your KPIs and adjusting your content depending on the results. At the end of your day, you want to convert your visitors into customers, and you will achieve it by correctly reading the statistics of your page.
We discussed KPIs with Jon-Stephen Stansel (@jsstansel), a university teacher who loves all things social media, and he gave us the following insight: “Working at a university, KPIs are a bit more difficult to pin down. I often say that no one decides to go to a college based on a Tweet.
So, I try to pick small, measurable KPIs that I can then base our overall performance on. For example, I regularly run campaigns to get prospective students to register for campus tours or to get current students to download our safety app. Since I can get solid numbers of how many people sign up or get the app based on our social posts, I can get a good indication of how successful our overall social media efforts are. There are several X factors to this method, but it gives us some clear numbers to share with campus stakeholders.”
Michelle Garrett from PR also talked with us about this topic: “First, I’d say that while tracking social media KPIs is important, not all the value from social media comes from what you can track. Lurkers make up a large portion of the audience. As for which KPIs matter most, engagement is at the top of everyone’s list these days. Even if you have a large following, if you don’t have *engaged* followers, people aren’t as likely to see your posts. So, a smaller engaged following wins out over a larger following with low engagement.”
It is important to know which KPIs to track and which actually matter for your business. Dr. Rissy’s Writing and Marketing can make this happen, and we will keep you updated through the process. Remember that you are the one who knows your business objectives and goals, and by working together, we can achieve incredible results!
