Each of your social media objectives must refer to at least one key performance indicator (KPI) – a metric which is measurable and which defines success. Choose KPIs that will best determine success.

Define Your KPIs

For example, if you have an objective of ‘growing a brand’s audience’, that could mean many things:

• Growing social reach among females aged 18-35 in Scotland
• Growing the social media following of the brand
• Growing the engaged social media following of the brand

Social Media Objectives and KPI Factors

The objective and KPI should be chosen based on a number of factors including the lifecycle of the brand, stage of the marketing funnel you are focussing on, and other marketing and brand activities.

Social Media Specific KPIs

There are three key social media KPIs which are designed to move the business forward in a number of ways.

It is helpful to divide them to ensure you are serving all of these areas of your social media activity.

KPI 1: Audience building

KPIs that describe growth of your social media audience and reach, such as:

• Followers
• Likes
• Views or impressions
• Subscriptions
• Reach of content

These could be used as follows:

Business objective: introduce our service to new professionals in NW England.

Marketing objective: Build awareness of our brand among female graduates in Manchester.

Social media objective: gain Facebook post reach of 1.5m among females in Manchester by 1st December.

KPI 2: Engagement

Metrics that quantify interaction with your brand on social platforms, such as:

• Likes
• Comments
• Shares
• Mentions of brand or hashtag

These could be used as follows:

Business objective: Grow customer retention.

Marketing objective: Develop a community around our hiking footwear brand.

Social media objective: Grow likes and comments on our Facebook and Instagram posts by 10% MoM (month-on-month) for the next 12 months.

KPI 3: ROI

Once the above objectives are being aimed for, you can measure the impact of your social activity on the business itself, to quantify the return on investment (ROI) of social media activity. Examples:

• Traffic from social
• Conversions from social
• Campaign reach
• Downloads

These could be used as follows:

Business objective: Drive more people to our fashion industry conferences.

Marketing objective: Reach new customers and ensure previous attendees are incentivised with good reasons to re-attend.

Social media objective: Generate 2,000 conversions from a blend of paid and organic social media content, employing a video explainer to attract 1,000 new attendees and a unique perk remarketed to existing customer base to drive 1,000 repeat purchases, within the next 8 weeks.

Join the discussion

Which KPIs do you think are the most useful for the following brands and organisations: 1) Nike 2) Barnes and Noble 3) H & M.