The Social Media KPIs and Tools for Measurement

In this video, Carlos Gil walks us through the importance of managing the ROI of your social media marketing.  He begins by explaining that we must align our social media efforts with our business strategies.  He provides the following steps: (Gil, 2019)

1. Determine which platforms to use based on where your customers are active
2. What are your competitors doing?
3. What is the purpose for being on social media?

Drive customer acquisitions and leads, brand awareness, customer service or talent acquisition? 

He states that not all social media platforms are the same.  For example, LinkedIn is best used for B2B connections with executives, whereas Instagram and Twitter are often used for B2C companies to engage with their customers (Gil, 2019).

He then defines, what he calls the “Four Pillars of Social Media Strategy” (Gil, 2019):

1. Content: what an end user will see about your brand – photos, videos, music, e-books, text based costs or conversation threads.
2. Community: the users who regularly consume and engage with your content.  Content is unlikely to be seen without an engaged community.  
3. Consistency: how often you post determine how often you appear in a users’ news feed.
4. Conversion: the actions users take when they engage with your brand: click, comment or share.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are integral in the success of social media.  Carlos provides the following KPI samples that can be used as a starting place: (Gil, 2019)

1. Impressions: the number pf times your content appears in the news feed (however, just because something has appeared in a someone’s news feed does not mean that the saw it)
2. Engagements: the number of times peoples interacted with your content.  This KPI is often viewed as a more valuable measurement than an impression.
3. Views: the number of times people see your video content.
   1. Sub metrics: completion % – how long someone watched the video and the Average watch time, which indicates how long the viewers are sticking around for.

Based on this information you can make adjustments accordingly.

• Clicks: the number of time people visit your website from a social media post.  This is often deemed as the most important metric.

In the video, Carlos provides an alarming statistic. The Average social media user will only watch something for 3 seconds.  Three seconds? That is a very short period of time to attract someone’s attention. 

With that said, he provides some tools that can be used to measure your ROI: (Gil, 2019)

• Free to Premium:
  • Track posts and engagements.  Buffer, Hootsuite, Sprout social, agorapulse. 
  • BuxxSumo, Keyhole, Netbase, Brand 24 can be used for analytics and overall Insights, Things like what’s being said about your brand online? 
  • YouTube Insights uses TubeBuddy and Rival IQ which offers competitive intel to tell you how your post is preforming compared to your competitors posts

Sites like these help you make data based decisions.  You can do this by analyzing:

• What are the insights?
  • What did you learn? 
  • What can you do better next time?

Each social networks provide similar analytics as the tools mentioned above.

• Facebook: Creator Studio and Business Manager are free tools provided by Facebook to allow you to view your post performance through ad insights and page analytics.  Because Facebook want you to invest in Facebook Ads, they include these tools so you can easily see the value in using their ad service.
• Twitter Insights: provides a month over moth data snap shot highlighting the top mentions, followers and content. Twitter identifies your top post so it can be easily shared again.
• LinkedIn: manages how many times your profile has appeared in search results and how many times your profile has been viewed.
• YouTube Insights: provides a summary of the channels performance in the last 28 days.  They track things like number of new subscribers, watch time and top videos being watched. 
• Instagram: provides insights relating to follower gained in the last 12 days, including the locations and age ranges of your followers.  You can also see the day of the week that your followers are most engaged. They also provide metrics around profile visits, website clicks and reach. 

Decoding Social Media Analytics: What does it mean?

Carlos recommends to think of social media as an extension to your website.  Facebook is free however by using their business analytics tools you can leverage their platform to have a better understanding how your content is performing. 

 Facebook provides the following data points:

• Likes of fan acquisition
• Reach
• Impressions
• Engagement
• Video Views
• Conversions, clicks, leads and purchases

Carlos recommends to access the Facebook Insights page weekly and review the results.  Reach, impressions and engagements on a week over week comparison compared over a 28 day period so you can get a good understanding of how your page is performance (Gil, 2019).

Facebook Insights also provides tools like page reach, which measures post performance by organic growth vs paid growth and when your followers are online and engaging with content.   You can also export data so you can keep historical records for longer term analytical analysis. 

Facebook offers a robust tool to create ads through Facebook.  You can target ads by age, location and interests.  If you are running a B2B or B2C business, Facebook also provides the option to create Lead Generation forms (Gil, 2019). 

Carlos recommends setting aside a Facebook ad budget to run re-occurring daily ads for $10-$300 per month.  Use Facebook ads to expand Facebook engagement beyond organic growth. 

You can leverage Facebook Insights by remembering that content only remains current for about 24 hours so it is important to repurpose old content.  Carlos instructs us to go to our Facebook page, Insights, Posts, scroll down to all posts published.  This will allow you to sort through your best performing posts.

You can revive old posts by commenting and liking your posts from the past.

Facebook can also be used as an ecommerce platform to promote and sell your products:

1. Set up your store
2. Select on the gear icon, manage shop and add the product
3. You can add images, videos of the products/services, list a description and add a check out url.

You can manage your catalogue of products, follow the shop link, than manage your catalogue. You will than see the back end of your store. There are two main areas of focus you should look at:

• Product data sources configuration to list each product individually
• Upload a data feed to auto import by Facebook data pixels.  This will imbed a code so that you track how users that go to your website through the Facebook post.

Instagram Insights can be accessed directly through the mobile app.  From your profile page, click on the number displayed on the top of your profile, followed by profile visits in the last 7 days.

1. You can see how many new followers you have, were they are located and their age ranges. The activity section will show you how many profile visitors came to your Instagram profile or website, week over week.

The more content you post and include hashtags (to appear in search results), the more organic growth you will experience.

Carlos warns that numbers will fluctuate week over week, if you are not consistent with a posting schedule.  

Each Instagram post has a story on the front end, with the captions, but also on the back end through the metrics.  Comments matter and bookmarks and shares mean more than a like.  When someone shares your content, it expands your reach beyond your followers (Gil, 2019). 

A unique feature of Instagram is the ability to build a community.  You can generate a leads list from your followers and Carlos provided a great example of this in the video.  He was writing a book and shared the journey on Instagram.  He created a poll asking his follower if they were excited to read his book.  For any that said yes, he sent them a link to purchase the book once it was released. He used this tool to generate new sales.  

Instagram is often referred to as a photo scrap booking tool, but Carlos mentions that it is the second most active social media platform following Facebook.  It can also be a powerful marketing tool.  Carlos states that it is important to create content that is relatable to your audiences.  Use their responses to craft content in the future.

LinkedIn, has 500M members and is the go to platform for business professionals. 

LinkedIn allows you to connect with other individuals based on location, job tile, industry and company (Gil, 2019).   

LinkedIn does not offer the same level of analytics as Facebook and Instagram, however it is still important to take advantage of the metrics that they do offer.  Two primary metrics are:

1. Who viewed your profile
2. How many times you appeared on a search

LinkedIn will tell you what your searchers do as an occupation and what keywords your searchers used to reach your profile based on the key words in your profile.

Optimizing your LinkedIn Profile: make sure you edit your headline to include industry relevant keywords so that you will appear in searches.  Carlos recommends to monitor your states weekly to ensure your profile is appearing in searches.  To promote this create and post relevant content and post relevant content only.

LinkedIn Groups: great way to expand your network by joining a group of people that have similar interests, work in your industry or are from your area.   To find groups you can use the search bar within LinkedIn. You can further filter by geographical area.  To expand your network, Carlos recommends joining 25+ groups related to your local/professional or industry specific groups and advises to show preference in selecting quality groups that align with your interests.

LinkedIn you can see who is viewing your profile, through your Dashboard, you will see “who viewed your profile” with a number, click on the link.  There will be a list of who has looked at your profile. 

Carlos recommends to engage with each person who has viewed your profile, but he also states don’t sell, and provides the following example of what you can say instead: “Hi, I saw that you were viewing my profile and am curious to learn why? Let’s connect and get to know each other!”

The more content you create and the more views you have = the more money you will make (Gil, 2019). Carlos shows us that his YouTube channel currently provides him with $575 a month.  As long as he remains active on the channel but creating new content, that number will continue to increase.  He also shows us an example of an anchor video, which is a video that keeps bringing traffic back to his channel.

The Formula for YouTube Monetization:

• In order to make money off of YouTube, you must first have 1000+ subscribers.
• To build an anchor video, Carlos recommends creating a list of 12-15 tutorials or how-to videos
• Title your new videos with keywords such as “tips]”, “how to” and “the best”
• Retitle existing videos for improved search optimization

YouTube Creator Studio provides you with a list of all your videos.  There you can select which video you would like to monetize and select what kind of ads you would like to run in conjunction with your video.

To keep growing you videos Carlos suggests running them on your other social media platforms and write blog posts and post on places like LinkedIn.

How to Use Video Content on Social Media:

1. Have a purpose: entertain or educate
2. Optimize titles and descriptions
3. Teach with how to videos
4. Outsource production resources
5. Download TubeBuddy

YouTube is the second most searched site, which can be a huge asset for small business.  Every small business should be investing in developing video content to humanize their brand and expand their reach.  Carlos provides the following list of areas a business owner do:

1. Meet the owner series
2. Employee takeover
3. Product tutorials or infomercials
4. Local business spotlight or video podcast

In Twitter everything is searchable and Twitter is used as a real-time search engine.  Carlos provides the example of a real estate agent looking for people tweeting “looking to buy a house”

You need to be consistent with your post on Twitter so Carlos recommends that you follow these steps:

1. Post questions to get answers
2. Give value: tips, advice and motivation
3. Post third party links in the replies and comments
4. Circle around to super fans and followers

Twitters Analytics allows you to learn more about your audience through audience insights and allows you to see popular discussions or events that your community is participating in. Twitter also holds a history of how your tweets have performed in the last 90 days.  This allows you to retweet you top performing posts.

To access Twitter Analytics, from your profile hit more, than analytics.  Here you can see how many tweets sent, tweet impressions, profile visits and mentions. Look at who your top follower is.  Carlos recommends to follow them back and engage with them.

The average life of a tweet is very short due to the fast pace of Twitter, which is why Carlos recommends that you look into your tweets in the last 90days and reply to each person who commented on the thread (Gil, 2019).

Bonus Strategies for Maximizing ROI

Twitter Cards allow your content to stand out without putting the link in the body of this tweet. This allows you to use your characters in a much better way, because twitter limits each post to 280 characters. This is also a great way to grow your click through conversions for free. Twitter cards need an eye-catching visual and an open call to action (link or product url)

To create your card, from your Twitter profile, select more, twitter ads.  From the card library, you will have the option to include a website card or a video card.

Instead of putting a link directly in your post, instead rely on the visual to attract interest.

Social media story telling is a new way of content marketing, storytelling is used by companies to be viewed as real and relatable.  The key to telling good stories are as follows:

1. Keep stories short
2. Have a beginning, middle and end
3. Include a call to action

Instagram is all about visuals.  Carlos provides the following tips:

1. Develop content that is visually appealing
2. Post often enough to keep followers engaged 
3. Tell short stores through the captions
4. Tag locations in your posts and stories
5. Add hashtags to maximize your reach

You captions need to be short, direct and to the point.  When writing ad copy, think more like a consumer.  Carlos provides the following the following tips:

1. One to two sentences in length
2. Lead with an open-ended question whenever possible
3. Refrain from using calls to action, such as “Comment below” and “Like this post”
4. Do not post a link in the caption

YouTube allows you to add a link to your url within your video. This can help you drive traffic to other areas like your website or blog.

Carlos further recommends that you need to monitor how your posts are performing by using such tools as Bitly and Google campaign URL builder. 

Bitly allows you to shorten your url’s and will also track the link through performance.  Once signed up, run the url’s through Bitly before posting.  You will receive demographic data of where the clicks came from so you can get a better understanding of who is visiting your site.

Google Campaign URL builder allows you to create posts with more than one link.  Carlos points out that the most important feature is the Campaign source field.  You can add this to your social media post so you can track with post performed better within each social media platform at driving website traffic (I.e. Facebook vs Instagram vs LinkedIn) 

Conclusions:

As Carlos defines in the video, social media is a must have and if something is important, it becomes important to measure it.  This video walks us through the primary social media platforms and walks us through the best ways to manage post performance and I believe that this will knowledge that I will need one day.

Today, as a student, I do not have much need for this specific requirement.  My social media posts are personal in nature, however I may need this information in the future for an employer.  To provide an applied example of a brand that does a great job creating content that engages with their audience, I think of Coca-cola’s  Share a Coke story, where millions of names were printed on labels to promote connection and social involvement.  This was a huge success.  One that Coke surely studied the data behind the promotion to do their best to replicate again in the future.  

References

Gil, C. (2019, October 9). The ROI of Social Media Marketing. Retrieved from LinkedIn Learning: https://www.linkedin.com/learning/social-media-marketing-roi-2/the-roi-of-social-media-marketing?accountId=2109516&u=2109516&success=true&authUUID=pF%2BRBBRvSfC%2FcfXRbxfpVQ%3D%3D