- Hi, my name is Crystal King,
and I'm the HubSpot Academy Social Media Professor.
Today you're gonna learn all about
setting social media goals.
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And enjoy.
- I think when somebody's starting out
on their social media strategy
determining what
they need to listen for
goes back to setting a list of goals.
What are you looking to accomplish?
Are you trying to understand
what your customers want?
How your customers feel about a certain topic?
Are you looking for content inspiration?
Maybe ways to create contests and get engagement
from your customers.
It all goes back to what you're looking to accomplish.
- Let's talk about setting social media KPIs.
Once you've created a buyer persona
and mapped out some smart goals,
you can do a deeper dive
and determine what key performance indicators, or KPIs,
you should be targeting in your social media strategy.
A KPI is a quantifiable measure
used to evaluate the success of an organization,
employee, or project in meeting objectives for performance.
Knowing what your KPIs are from the start
will help you make crucial decisions on content,
advertising, budget, and other resources you may need.
The main thing to consider
is how you can develop actionable goals
instead of goals
of merely reporting a high result on a vanity metric.
And what's a vanity metric?
Simply put, a vanity metric is a surface-level metric
made up of numbers or statistics
that seem great when viewed in a presentation,
but don't correlate to business success.
For example, follower count is probably one of the fluffiest
of the various KPIs.
Having as many followers as possible may look impressive,
but if they aren't the right people following you,
the ones who are going to buy your products and services,
then that follower count
is essentially only a vanity metric.
- Certainly having followers and likes on social media
are great.
The real key here is having the right size.
So for example, a national pizza chain
is gonna have a lot more followers and fans
than a local pizza chain,
but that doesn't tell you anything
about a metric beyond that awareness piece.
And so the key is to have the right number of followers,
and make sure that you're giving them
lots of ways to engage,
lots of ways to create some user-generated content,
lots of ways to share,
and lots of ways to engage with the brand
and make a purchase.
- To set the right KPIs,
you need to go back to your business goals.
If your goal is to increase sales,
vanity metrics such as numbers of likes, shares, retweets,
followers, and page views,
are not going to be the most important metrics
for you to measure.
But if your goal is awareness,
then those metrics may not just be vanity metrics.
Followers, reach, and page views
may be more important for you.
Let's break this down a bit further.
There are four categories of social media KPIs,
and most of your target should fall within those areas.
Reach, engagement, return on investment, or ROI,
retention and loyalty.
Let's start by looking at reach.
These KPIs tend to be the most fluffy,
and they veer toward what many think are vanity metrics.
But if your business goals are tied to company awareness
and reaching as many qualified users as possible,
then these may be the KPIs you want to measure.
Follower count.
How many individuals follow your social channels?
Impressions.
How often your content is viewed.
Mentions.
How many times your brand is mentioned
across social channels.
Share of voice.
How many people are talking about your brand
versus the competition.
Engagement is next.
These KPIs demonstrate how engaged your audience is,
and how they might be interacting with your content.
Which is usually a better indicator than reach
when it comes to measuring the success of your campaigns.
The following KPIs measure how people are taking action
in relation to your brand.
Likes or favorites indicate your viewers
appreciate the content.
This is a simple action,
and often one of the biggest vanity metrics,
but useful to measure
to determine if a content is of interest.
Comments indicate direct engagement with your content.
Sharing and retweets
demonstrate that your audience
cares enough about the content
that they want to let others know.
This also increases reach and awareness.
Customer ratings and reviews
demonstrate strong engagement and opinion.
They are also one of the biggest indicators
to other people that product or service is worth buying.
Inbound website links from social media
show that your content is interesting enough
for your audience to click through to your site.
Measuring social media ROI and garnering leads
are goals that many salespeople
and executives will gravitate toward.
While often harder to drive,
these are the types of KPIs
that can directly affect the business' bottom line.
This means that executives may be more open
to listening to proposals from your social team
when it comes to asking for additional budget
or head count to meet those business goals.
Some of these KPIs include:
direct sales revenue from social media,
such as orders that come in from a coupon
or links into your website that lead to purchase.
Lead conversions from social media campaigns.
This may vary from company to company,
but could include email sign-ups, downloads
of materials like an ebook,
or activations of trial software.
Support costs-per-customer.
If your business goal is to reduce
customer support call costs,
for example, you may want to set KPIs
for how many calls you can offset
by helping them on your social media channels instead.
Lifetime value.
This is the projected revenue
a customer will generate in their lifetime.
There are a variety of ways to calculate this number,
and how you acquire the customer.
In this case, through social media,
especially acquisition plays and customer touch points,
will affect the lifetime value.
Last, but definitely not least,
is retention and loyalty.
If your business goals are centered around
customer excellence or on retaining customers,
then your social KPI should be aligned to reflect this.
Consider the following:
customer reviews and ratings.
Mentioned previously, these are a fantastic measure
of how your customers think about your brand and products.
Issues resolved
demonstrates how well you are doing or not doing,
taking care of your customers through social media.
Another metric to consider in tandem
is your SLA, or service-level agreement.
In the social space,
the SLA usually refers to how long time passes
between when a customer reaches out
and when there is a response.
Note that a response doesn't always mean
the issue is resolved.
That might be another KPI to consider.
Time to resolution.
How long it takes for a question that comes in
from social media to receive not just a reply,
but a resolution.
Customer satisfaction.
It's often tracked with a net promoter score,
often called NPS.
This gives you a sense of whether or not
your social customer service efforts are working.
Sentiment is a tricky metric to measure.
But it's important because sentiment tells you
what people are thinking and feeling about your brand.
Is it negative?
Perhaps your KPI should be set
to shift that balance to positive.
And lastly, make sure to revisit your KPIs
on a six-month to yearly basis.
Not only does the world of social media change, and fast,
but your business changes too.
If your business goals change,
then your KPIs probably need to be reworked as well.
Now you have the foundation for developing KPIs
that will help you prove the value
of your social media efforts.
(upbeat music)