Stop Flying Blind

on Social

A Socialbakers Guide
to Social Media KPIs
 Now an integral part of any successful marketing strategy, social media has matured.
It’s no longer enough to simply be “on” social, measuring simple metrics. You need
to be proactive on several platforms, engage with your audience, drive business goals,
and then you need to put it all context. That means getting your KPIs right and reporting
them intelligently.

In this guide, we detail the metrics that are key to measuring success in brand awareness,
customer care, sales, and more on social. Remember, it’s not about one metric, it’s about
all of them. Here we provide a framework for getting your social measurement on track
so you can start producing winning results on social.

Social media workflow and strategy

Social Media has evolved rapidly. Now it is the time to objectively evaluate how social media marketing contributes
to your overall marketing strategy - where does social sit? What are your goals on social? - and the bottom line.

The best way to successfully communicate and advocate for your social media strategy is through data. The numbers
don’t lie. You need to be able to show performance for the right KPIs and benchmark against your competition and
industry.

Align KPIs to your marketing goals.

Typically the efforts of marketing departments can be divided into 3 categories - Branding, Demand Generation,
and Customer Care.

Marketing activities related to these 3 key points accompany the potential clients on their journey from lead to client.
The full cycle is depicted below:

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 Loyalty Awareness
Customer Care Branding
Loyalty Programs Offline and Online Ads
Better Customer Service Product Placement
Inproving Value Event Sponsorship
Brand Popularity
The Purchasing
Lifecycle and
The Role
of Marketing

Trial Evaluation

Demand Generation Marketing

Brochures, White Papers, Comparative Charts, Free Coupons, Sales

1. Branding
The early stage of the purchase life cycle, this is the main endeavour to raise awareness about new products,
brands, and/or services.

2. Demand Generation
After raising awareness, you need to get people interested. This includes social, emailing, brochures/handouts,
reports, events, and more.

3. Social Customer Care - Turn your clients into loyal clients

Caring about client satisfaction and loyalty is the harbinger of a mature client-centric company.
You understand that reducing churn and adopting a client-first approach is the key to longevity.

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 Different KPIs for Different Goals

1. Brand Awareness
How Can Social Contribute to Brand Awareness?

When you’re rolling out a new campaign via traditional offline channels - TV ads, outdoor, and print campaigns, align
and support them with your online activities to ensure the 360-degree approach - spreading the campaign message
in multiple designated channels. You want your audience to connect the dots and associate your brand
with a particular image and feeling - and that’s what social is all about.

You can hit multiple local markets instantly on social. Recent surveys show that key demographics tend to spend
more time on social (especially on mobile devices) than watching TV. So go there. Social also allows you
to measure like never before - especially if you’re using Socialbakers Analytics. Trying to drive brand awareness?
Here’s what to track and why:

What to Track Why it Matters

Fan Growth and Distribution
(by Country, Language, Gender, Age)
Know your audience. Evaluate the campaigns, content, and promoted posts that
add to your audience - and the ones that don’t.
Knowing who your Fans are - where they are, what they like, what they discuss
online, etc. - is crucial. You need to deliver relevant and have the right global/local
page mix.

Maximizing Reach and (especially) Impressions is key. Multiple impressions

for a brand awareness campaign can make the difference between reinforcing
Reach and Impressions
your brand name and simply reaching more people. Track what content works
best for your audience and promote those posts to expand.

The keys to social media success are content and targeting. The content
has to be inspiring, interesting, and shareable. By tracking interactions you
Total Interactions
can evaluate how your fans and followers are respond to your posts and which
content works and which doesn’t for them.

Shares are the most valuable type of interactions as it strengthens the reach
Total Shares of your posts. What content does your audience consider so interesting that they
want to share it?

Many users - the majority - are not actively interacting with content with Shares,
Page Consumption - Link Clicks,
Likes, etc., but that doesn’t mean they aren’t clicking on the link or checking out
Photo Views, Video Plays
your photo or video. Social traffic = site traffic.

One of the most underestimated factors in Facebook marketing - negative

feedback - when people decide to hide your posts from their Timelines, report
Negative Feedback
it as a spam or unfollow your brand. It is important to track to see what content
was disliked. Those actions can really hurt your Reach.

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 Example

Socialbakers Analytics has a powerful Content Newsfeed section, where all your and selected competitors’
posts are aggregated to see what content works best. With powerful Facebook Insights Integration you can see
not only your public metrics ( Interactions, Likes, Comments, Shares, interactions per 1 000 Fans and its evolution
in real-time) but also private metrics - Reach, Negative Feedback, Page Consumption).

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 How Interactions Correlate with Reach
Better, more engaging pieces of content get more impressions. Our data shows that Engagement positively
correlates with Reach, and both drive each other. Below, you can see the level of Organic Reach gained
by Brands (not including other Page types):

Compare this to how many total unique impressions, including paid, that the same subset of Pages got.
Post Boosting amplifies the correlation dramatically.

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 As you can see at the top end of the graph, the posts with more than 5,000 Interactions are receiving a huge
amount of extra impressions. This is due in part to the paid Reach that kicks in at scale at this level. Clearly, this
shows the power of amplifying your best posts through great advertising – and how the right posts can achieve
huge Reach when they are promoted.

Recommendations

Track what content works best - yours and also your competitors .

Track what format of the content work best to not to lag behind the current trends that drive the most
engagement. One of our recent reports shows that Facebook has consistently outperformed YouTube
in terms of driving video views and engagement, content marketers have reacted and have switched
to natively published Facebook videos which are increasingly popular and will likely dominate in 2015.

Track if you are reaching the right audience with the content that is locally relevant/in the right language.

Invest in promoting the best performing posts to get even higher reach and brand awareness. Using specific
targeting is one of the easiest methods to ensuring you are delivering the right message to the right
audience. Moreover interest targeted ads have a higher CTR than non-targeted ads.

“Socialbakers is helping us to take decisions in real time, comparing, benchmarking,

and analyzing all the information, all the KPIs important to take decisions, take actions
and increase the numbers.”

2. Demand Generation Marketing

How Can Social Contribute to Sales?

Tracking and reviewing referral traffic to your website from social networks, generated leads, and direct sales from
social help you define the real business impact of your social media marketing initiatives.There are two ways that
social can contribute to sales.

a) Hard-selling paid ad campaigns - Typical for retail and e-commerce industries

b) Long-term approach - In the initial phase of the social conversation, the tactics are intended to reach prospects
who are early in the sales cycle - to attract them, regularly engage with them, and to create brand awareness and
interest. The ultimate goal is to fuel the sales pipeline with the leads converted from social traffic and, in the long
term, to convert them into clients.

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 What to Track Why it Matters

The more people can see your content, the more people can interact with your
Reach
content. That means site visits.

Total Interactions
The more interactions a post gets, the more interesting the audience finds it.

CTR is one of the best indicators of campaign performance. These leads can
Clicks
be very strong, especially if you are effectively targeting your content.

Go one step further and measure the conversion rates from social traffic with
Conversion rate
the use of Google Analytics or other 3rd party tools.

“Thanks to Socialbakers, we were able to clearly explain how our social activities
led to client conversions and convince our executives to take this area
of business seriously.”

The graph below shows how engagement on Facebook correlates with total visits of brand websites. Notice that
when Interactions were high, visits to their websites increased, likewise, when Interactions diminished so did visits
to their websites.

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 Recommendations

Track the traffic from social, what content works best, and if you are reaching your target audience.
Tailor and target your future content to achieve even better CTRs.

Every Like, Share, Comment, and Retweet means another opportunity for website conversion. Building a loyal,
engaged following improves your ability to drive sales.

If you have a database of leads with the email addresses or FB IDs, use custom audiences for better targeting.

Use 3rd party applications – web analytics and CRM tools track the history of the conversation and how
social contributes to the sales pipeline.

3. How Social Contributes to Customer Care

Building brand loyalty is one of the best long-term investments for your business. For many brands, social media has
proved as an effective channel for building loyalty due to its transparency and the possibility to maintain dialogue with
your audience.

a) Every contact that the clients have with your brand influences whether or not they’ll come back. With each positive
client experience, the repurchasing probability goes up.

b) When potential clients see your brand communicating effectively on social, it can positively influence them while
evaluating their future purchase.

If social customer care matters for your brand, it is essential to focus on social customer care and to establish
relationships with brand advocates. Excellent client service can do more for attracting and retaining your client than
any amount of marketing.

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 The Evolution of Social Customer Care
Social is great channel for client service. In 2011, average
Question Response Rate (QRR) of brands on Facebook
was 5%. But, as social media evolved and the amount
of incoming questions increased, some brands took notice.
In Q3 2014 the average QRR on Facebook was 70%.

Telecoms, Airlines, Financial firms, and Retail brands

tend to respond to the most customer queries on Facebook
(see chart). To check current trends, statistics, and how
Socially Devoted your brand is, check our Socially Devoted
benchmark. We’ve been tracking this for years.

What does it mean for the business?

Remember: every client is unique and prefers a different
communication channel. You should be there where your
clients want you to be, not the other way around.

Why do clients turn to social media?

Clients in the online world are very demanding, and expect
quick and accurate support immediately. See how your
social team is handling the volume of questions, and how
fast they are answering them - both crucial components
in perfecting and optimizing your social client care.
Thats why we recommend following KPIs:

What to Track Why it Matters

Represents the volume of demand and how effectively the brand manages
Answered - Unanswered Questions
to respond to it.

The number of unanswered questions divided by the number of all incoming

Response Rate questions. With this, you can better analyze the evolution of social customer
care and your position in comparison to the competitors.

Response Time The time it takes, on average, to respond to incoming questions.

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 Recommendations

Track day-by-day, week-by-week, or month-by-month progress and build your social staff workflows around
periods of peak demand and track the results of of providing effective social customer care.

Track the distribution of the questions, response rates, and times during the day - are there any peak times
and are you reacting accordingly?

Compare your performance with the competitors - without evaluating your performance in the competitive context.

Socialbakers Analytics offers a competitive visualization. It shows how the brands are responding to the demand in
form of Response Rate on Y-Axis and in the same time you see the number of questions received. In the same time
you can see the Average Response Time.

“Before Socialbakers, our average Question Response Rate was something like 57%.
In just two quarters, it jumped to 97%. And our Response Time fell from 12 hours to 4.5 hours.”

Who’s Saying What?

Another approach to tracking social customer care on social is qualitative analysis of interactions.
For this, take a closer look at:

Who is interacting with your brand the most

What is the tone of voice and sentiment of these interactions

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 Socialbakers Analytics provides a powerful Key Influencers section, where the list of the most active users
is aggregated with the history of their activities.

Brands can dive deep into these activities, posts, comments, and manually tag the sentiment of the conversations
as positive, negative, or neutral and see the distribution of the sentiment and its evolution over time.

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 Recommendations

Tracking the most active fans enables you to reward the active fans and (in case of positive reactions), approach
them individually and turn them into brand advocates.

In case of negative reactions, turn the feedback into positive change.

Evaluate sentiment of the fans posts, questions, and comments - is it negative or positive? - and track the
evolution of your social reputation over time.

Where’s the ROI?

Financial metrics work great for demand generation marketing that immediately results in sales. A short time delay
between action and reaction of the client is a condition for successful and precise ROI identification.
That’s why it is easy to quantify ROI from Social Ads.

Brand Awareness and Customer Care plays an important role in the social media marketing and in the long-term,
engagement and maintaining regular conversation leads to driving purchase interest. Both have positive effects on
future purchases, but to measure the exact ROI accurately there is needed an integration of more advanced 3rd party
applications. ROI is the sweet spot, no doubt. But, getting there starts with effective measurement and analysis of all
your social media activities. You need to be able to quantify if the reach of your brand, engagement and customer
care is improving, because improving social conversation leads to higher ROI.

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 The Keys to Social Media Success
To sum up, there are three things you should bear in mind if you want to truly improve your social media efforts:

a) Set Goals. What do you want to achieve? The best way to set realistic goals is to benchmark your performance
against your industry and competitors. Looking at your performance out-of-context will tell you very little about
where you are and where you want to go. Try Socialbakers Analytics to start benchmarking like a pro.

b) Align your Goals with your Overall Business Plan. You need to figure out how social media can help you
with your overall marketing objectives. Whether your company needs better brand awareness, to drive sales,
or to improve your social customer care, social can help you immensely.

c) Regular Reporting: Evaluate your performance weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annually. Heck, do it even more,
it’s worth it. Regular reporting enables you to:

Flexibly react and adjust your content strategy. What worked last month might not work now.

Assess the accuracy of your reporting – have you been using the right KPIs? Are you comparing your
performance against the right benchmarks and competitors?

Continually evaluate your progress and create realistic goals. Where should your brand be on social media
in one month? In one year?

Don’t fly blind anymore – try out our Socialbakers Analytics free for 30 days, and see what smarter social
marketing is all about.

Want to go even deeper with your social media strategy? Shoot us an e-mail at info@socialbakers.com.

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 Contact us

If you have any questions about the Socialbakers Flying Blind Study
- or want to suggest something for it - get in touch with us
at info@socialbakers.com.