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.

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):

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.

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.

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.

• 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.
• 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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:

• 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.
• 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.
• 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?