Establish Key Performance Indicators for Social Media
In our previous post, Understand the Social Media Maturity Stage of Your Organization, we suggested that emphasizing Return On Engagement (ROE) rather than ROI may be appropriate for social media, especially inside the enterprise. In this post, we take a brief look at Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that you should consider to help measure social media performance.
Some rights reserved by william.neuheiselEstablish KPIs
Your Key Performance Indicators are not going to be the same as someone else’s. You need to determine what your organization’s goals are and how you are going to measure them. But to get you started, here’s eConsultancy Editor in Chief Chris Lake’s list[1] of 35 KPIs:
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Key Performance Indicators |
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| Alerts (register and response rates / by channel / Click Through Ratio / post click activity) | Profile (for example, update avatar, bio, links, email, customization, and so on) |
| Bookmarks (onsite, offsite) | Print page |
| Comments | Ratings |
| Downloads | Registered users (new / total / active / dormant / churn) |
| Email subscriptions | Report spam / abuse |
| Fans (become a fan of something / someone) | Reviews |
| Favorites (add an item to favorites) | Settings |
| Feedback (via the site) | Social media sharing / participation (activity on key social media sites, for example, Facebook, Twitter, Digg, etc) |
| Followers (follow something / someone) | Tagging (user-generated metadata) |
| Forward to a friend | Testimonials |
| Groups (create / join / total number of groups / group activity) | Time spent on key pages |
| Install widget (on a blog page, Facebook, etc) | Time spent on site (by source / by entry page) |
| Invite / Refer (a friend) | Total contributors (and percent active contributors) |
| Key page activity (post-activity) | Uploads (add an item, for example, articles, links, images, videos) |
| Love / Like this (a simpler form of rating something) | Views (videos, ads, rich images) |
| Messaging (onsite) | Widgets (number of new widgets users / embedded widgets) |
| Personalization (pages, display, theme) | Wishlists (save an item to wishlist) |
| Posts | |
Establish Key Performance Indicators for Social Media is the 48th in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). At this rate it’ll be a long time before we get through all 430 pages, but luckily, if you’re impatient, the book is available in paper form at http://bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson and you can save $5 using Coupon Code 62YTRFCV
See the previous posts What is Social Media?, Social Sites Defined, Why Social Media? How is Social Media Relevant to Business? First Steps Toward a Social Media Strategy, and Decide What Your Business Will Do About Social Computing, pt. 1
Next up: Assign a Social Media Monitor
[1] Chris Lake is Director of Innovation for eConsultancy: bit.ly/cFjEe4
