Social Media KPI´s

Brian Solis did some of the best sessions on this years Social Media Success summit and today I was browsing his website and found this article.
You Cant Measure What It Is You Do Not Value

Let´s talk about KPI´s today. Key Performance Indicators.
"Design outcomes and returns and integrate KPIs that capture progress, performance, and opportunities for optimization" Brian writes.
Progress, Performance and Opportunities - Increased brand awareness, Leads Sales and Loyalty I would interpret.

Return of investment could be Increase sales, Share of voice, Brand sentiment and many other things but how do we get there? How do we establish goals on the journey? What should we look for, measure, document and use to adjust or change our content and strategy so that we end up where we originally planned to?
The ROI itself is not having 150 comments per post instead of 35, that´s just an action, a result of great content but when the CEO asks you about the ROI that´s not going to be enough. But the number of comments is in fact one of many possible KPI.

Let´s lists some up here:

1. CTR (Click through Rate), Subscription rate, Unique visitors and Page views on blog. Google analytics can measure how well your blog is resonating within the community. Document each week or month the traffic. If it´s increasing - good. If not, maybe the content needs to be changed, maybe the design of the blog should be considered to change too? Lot´s of Page views but not an over whelming number of uniques? Means the content is good and people stick around to read for a while, but maybe you´re not promoting the blog well?

2. Number of comments on blog, retweets and mentions on Twitter, comments and likes on Facebook (Daily feedback in Facebook Insights), comments on discussion posts/news and groups on Linked In. Number of fans and followers, number of times people use your hashtags, fan generated posts, reviews and downloads. This is what I call engagement rates. This is also a good sign to know if you´re content is appreciated and if you´re on the right track.

3. Email subscription, registered users to group or forum and social media sharing

4. Influence. Through SocialMention or Google Alerts, measure the share of voice once per month. Share of voice in my book can be a KPI and sometimes part of the over all ROI too. If in fact one of the objective from the beginning was to Increase Brand Awareness then Share of voice is in fact not only a KPI but also a part of your ROI presentation.

"But my boss wants pure hard leads" you may think. Ok no problem but then some tracking tools will be necessary.
Google analytics and Bit.ly can help you with that. Specific campaign forms posted on blog or in the community, shorten the FB and TW links through Bit.ly and go back to track how many clicked on the links, put Google analytics on your FB Fan page, or simply ask those who contact you how they found you. Maybe add a Social Media button on the contact form?
I´m not a fan of over-selling or bombarding people with Buy-Our-Stuff messages but I would say that in at least 30% of your messages there should be a call-to-action. That´s 1 out of 3 weekly Facebook posts for example. The second post should be about something really valuable for your customer, something that can HELP him or her decide. It could be something that doesn´t even have anything to do with your company or your product but is helpful to your target customer. The third post should be FUN, fun and engaging. Hey, who doesn´t like to have a bit of fun?!

Hopefully these KPI´s can get you going in your quest to measure your social media efforts and if you do it right, tweek the content so that the KPI´s show you a positive result you should be on your way to glorious ROI too :-)

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How To Analyse Facebook Insights

If your goals and objectives with your Facebook marketing campaigns include Awareness or Loyalty, it's a good idea to know how to analyse the activities on your Facebook page.
Other social media platforms offer external tools, such as Hootsuite or TweetStats for Twitter. Facebook however offer their inhouse measuring tool, Facebook Insight. This is a powerfool tool and can be very useful. I wouldn't be surprised if Facebook sooner than later will roll out even more stats for page owners or maybe an optional pay-for extra service. Facebook Insight could very well be a direct competitor to Google Analytics soon.
So, it's important to know how to read all these numbers and what to do with them.
Yesterday I asked Mari Smith, the Facebook marketing guru of all times to give me some tips how to best read the Facebook Insight Stats. Or maybe not so much how to read them but how to analyze them. She answered me that it's a complex subject and apparently she talks a lot about it in her book Facebook Marketing 1 Hour Per Day so I bought it.

Let me list up what I know now and then I will tell you what I learned more from the book once I receive it.
Lets first mention what is called Impressions which you can see under each post as an admin. This number is the times that that post has been seen in the newsfeed and on your page. ALSO it includes the times the content has been viewed in social plug-ins maybe on your webpage for example.

Next to Impressions you see Feedback. Now here is the math:  Lets say my post has 1502 Impressions, and 0,67% Feedback and 10 Likes. It all ads up by taking 0.67% of 1502=10.
For those of you who didn't do well in the math classes you can use this simple tool: Online Calculator Percentage

Monthly Fan growth. Document the number of fans the 1st of each month to see the growth cycle. Important to watch for are spikes and then go back to those dates and see what happened that day. Did you post something special? Did your company have a TV campaign run that week?
Go to Insight and click on the USERS section.

Number of Likes and Comments.
This is a number to measure engagement. Good tool to use to know what content works good and what does not work good.

Unsubscribes.
Important stat to use to go back and look at days when there was a spike. Did we post too much that day?

Total Tab Views (Under the Users section too)

What tabs get most views? This could help you determine your landing page and content strategy. If the Video tab gets a lot of views maybe that's where you should put your energy...

Another interesting metric is to find out how many of your fans actually come back to your page.
This is how you find out. Take the number of page views, subtract the number of unique page views and you will get the number of returning fans. In my example below I had 127 returning fans on May 14th.

Page Growth Rate is calculated by taking the number of New Likes (My case last month was 406) MINUS Unlikes which you can see here was 97.  My May number would therefore be 309. This number I would write down and compare to next months number.

Other things to measure could be mentions of your brand or demographics.
These are my points for Insight. Lets see what Mari Smith can teach me with her book :-)Tweet

Social Media ROI

People keep discussing this subject, yes or no, is there a measurable ROI on your social media activities.
Can you measure the effect? Yes.
Is there a concrete ROI? Sometimes yes, most of the time (RIGHT NOW!) no. But I have no doubt in the world that within a year or two most businesses will see a clear ROI on their SM efforts.
The main problem at the moment I think is that most companies don´t really know what they´re doing, and why they´re doing it. Their competitor is in SM so they should be too, and so the friend of the cousin of the owner has a FB page so he can do it right?

Lets be frank, with this approach, it will be almost impossible to have any ROI, simply because you don´t know what you´re measuring and what to benchmark against.

A clear example of Social Media resulting in cost savings is when it´s used as customer service. Reduction in call center activity is absolutely a proven fact.
Media impressions (Burger King), increased product awareness (Ford Fiesta), physical sales through Twitter or through F-Commerce (DELL) are some other examples of Social Media ROI.
Sure these are big businesses with a large existing community. If you are a smaller company you will need to have lots of patience and think long term.

But still the situation is what it is. Most companies are not investing appropriately and by no means should they - when they don´t know where, how and why.

Education is one important part of this. Try and fail is another.
Companies looking for 10 years of experience in their social media person will have a hard time finding that person, simply because we are all relatively new in this area. But make no mistake, there is a HUGE difference in hiring a "community manager" who knows or do doesn´t know.
First thing ALWAYS have to be about listening. Companies talk to much. Find influensers, people who have a large following and who represents trust. If you can manage to enter into the Trustosphere you have a huge advantage.
Credible people within your area might wanna guest blog for you? That creates an added value for the client which is the ultimate goal here. We have to offer something extra, some reason for a person to come back to our Facebook page or website. More than 80% of the people never return to a fan page after they have pushed the like button.

Evaluating where is the customer. On Facebook? Blogs? Twitter? Is he/she a video consumer? Then comes the Goals. How much money can we save on customer service? How much can we increase sales through online activities? Can we increase the average size order or build more loyalty among our customers? Can we build awareness about our product through a cool application on Facebook or create momentum around an event through a live Twitter chat?
Then comes the planning... Much much later comes the actual posts on Facebook, Blogs or Twitter...
No ONE strategy fits every company. The ROI has to be evaluated case by case.

A lot of the information in this video is not new anymore but I found it good anyway.

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