When you log into your business’s social media accounts, how do you measure their success? Is it likes? Followers? Reach? For more than half of our readers, the answer is yes. But, I want to let you in on a little secret: more followers or likes do not equal more ROI or indicate you have a successful social media strategy.
Vanity Metrics
Facebook likes, Twitter followers, and page views are called vanity metrics, which are numbers that often look impressive but don’t actually correlate with the success of your business. For example, if you have 14,000 followers on Twitter and most of them are spam accounts or people who aren’t one of your buyer personas, they are never going to buy from your business. How is that helping your business? It’s not.
If you care about vanity and want to focus all your social media efforts on increasing these metrics, that’s fine. But you should understand you are putting all your time and effort toward something your business will never see return on, ultimately losing you money in the long run.
The Important Stuff
If followers and likes aren’t indicators of how much return and benefit you are seeing from social media, what metrics should you care about? Well, it ultimately depends on what’s most important to your business. Here are some of the most important KPIs and what you should measure to determine whether or not you’re accomplishing your goals:
- Reach
- Number of followers in your target audience
- Impressions
- Mentions
- Share of voice
- Engagement
- Likes
- Comments
- Shares
- Ratings
- Inbound website links
- ROI
- Direct sales revenue
- Lead conversions
- Support cost per customer
- Lifetime value
- Retention and loyalty
- Customer reviews
- Issues resolved
- Service level agreement
- Time to resolution
- Customer satisfaction
- Sentiment
Your KPI doesn’t have to remain the same – in fact, it should change every few months. You should be evaluating how social media can benefit your larger marketing goals and then change your social media strategy and KPIs to help you measure the success of your social media. Over time, as you learn what’s working and what’s not, you will see more and more return on social and will crush it in important KPIs as well as the vanity metrics you initially cared about.
Need some help with your social media strategy? Whether it’s exchanging emails about your hard-hitting questions or getting together to discuss how we can help, we’d love to hear from you! Shoot us an email at info@wespeakeasy.com, and your social media strategy will be up to snuff in no time.
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