For many marketers, social media is the great white buffalo of a marketing plan. With its many moving parts, many shy away from it or use it ineffectively because they’re unsure of how to match social media key performance indicators, or KPIs, with their brand objectives. But even if KPIs are being measured, measuring the wrong ones often leads marketers to believe that their social media efforts aren’t providing real ROI. Here is a brief walkthrough to help you identify which social KPIs are most important for brand awareness.
First things first, we must have a clear picture of how social media will help us solve our business problems. In the case of brand awareness, we would put higher priority on the KPIs that relate to increasing brand reach, or the distance that our messages actually travel. These KPIs would include:
- Number of followers. This is simply the number of people who follow your social channels.
- Impressions. How many times your post shows up in someone’s newsfeed. Content can get impressions when someone is already following your brand’s social page, or if your content is shared with a follower’s networks. It’s important to note that an impression doesn’t necessarily mean that content was seen, but that it could have been seen.
- Traffic data. This is the percentage of website traffic that comes from social media. This data can be collected by including trackable URLs to your website with your social content, and can be a handy metric if you’re already using a marketing platform, such as HubSpot.
It’s absolutely true that figuring out how to leverage social media to drive results can be tricky. But by identifying the right KPIs that work toward your business goals, catching the great white buffalo that is social media marketing will be just a little more doable.