What KPIs are used in SMM. Determining the effectiveness of SMM

One of the main problems when working with an SMM (social media marketing) specialist is the inability to determine whether he is working or just suffering garbage imitating violent activity. Social media marketing is meaningless without key performance indicators (KPIs) that demonstrate how well and fully the work is being done. Let's talk about this and tell you how the analysis of the effectiveness of SMM promotion is carried out.

SMM Performance Metrics

There are several basic parameters that allow you to analyze and determine the results of activity in social media. By themselves, they are not able to provide comprehensive information, but using them in a complex will help build a complete picture.

So, the key performance indicators of SMM are:

growth in the number of community/group subscribers;
reach of advertisements;
post reach; (read also about viral reach)
user activity;
increased activity during the period of competitions and draws;
increase in site traffic from a group in a social network and an increase in traffic;
economic parameters;
and, of course, the most important is the number of targeted actions performed by users.

Let's consider each SMM performance indicator separately.

Community/Group Subscriber Growth

Steady growth in the number of subscribers is the most obvious indicator of the effectiveness of SMM and that the work is being done in the right direction. If the audience grows every day, it means that the group contains useful and interesting content, provides the necessary and relevant information. But in this case, you need to pay attention to another indicator of the effectiveness of SMM - user activity. It happens that the number of subscribers is impressive, but there are no likes, comments and reposts as such or very few. This may indicate a large percentage of non-target audience or uninteresting content.

In this case, you need to ask the CMM manager what methods he uses to increase the number of subscribers. As a rule, advertising tools are considered the most effective: promotional posts and targeted advertising. But before launching them, it is important to identify the age, gender, location and interests of the target audience, so as not to “catch up” with people in the community whose topic or product is completely uninteresting to them.

This method of recruiting subscribers in social media marketing is considered "white", while there are also "black" ones, when an SMM specialist sins by cheating - by attracting offers (people who perform the necessary actions for a reward) and bots (services that imitate user activity on social networks ). The result of these actions seems to be ideal: the number of subscribers is growing steadily, but the SMM performance indicator has not been reached - the activity in the group is low, as well as sales volumes.

Ad Reach

Reach is the number of unique users who see your ad.

At the same time, coverage is a rather unreliable thing in the analysis of the effectiveness of SMM, as it shows the number of users who were shown an advertisement, but does not indicate whether it was viewed to the end or simply scrolled through the feed. Therefore, coverage should be considered in conjunction with engagement, that is, the reaction of people to a promo post.

age, gender, interests and hobbies of the audience;
location of potential customers to whom advertising will be shown;
ad display time;
ad type (pay per 1000 impressions or per clicks);
photo, text and ad format;
increase the budget.

In addition to this indicator, when analyzing the effectiveness of CMM promotion, it is also important to take into account the number of clicks on an advertisement and the percentage completion of the action you need (following a link, filling out a form, ordering a product).

Post Reach

In addition to the reach of ads, you also need to track the reach of regular posts posted on the page. You can view both the overall reach of the group and individual posts. And if this indicator is steadily growing upwards, then we can conclude that the content of your group is interesting to a wide audience, and KPI SMM has been achieved.

On Facebook and Instagram, reach is divided into paid and organic. The latter refers to the number of people who saw the post in their feed, paid - the one we talked about above. In recent years, these social networks have seen a deliberate decrease in organic reach in order to encourage users to place ads.

User activity

The activity of the audience in social networks is another important indicator of the effectiveness of SMM promotion. Subscriber engagement is determined by approvals (likes and likes), distribution (reposts, reposts, retweets), comments. All this speaks only in favor of a group or community, since a page where there is not even a smell of activity may seem boring and useless to potential subscribers, and they will simply go to competitors.

The low activity of subscribers with their impressive number can be provoked by two reasons:

A small percentage of the target audience. The case when many subscribers were recruited by an SMM specialist “for show” and they are not at all interested in your content. Output: finding and attracting target users who will certainly be interested in the information of your group.
Irrelevant, boring, irrelevant content. For example, pictures of animals on the page of an online store of household appliances, jokes in a drug sales group, an excessive number of advertising posts. Output: studying the target audience and updating content.

To analyze the effectiveness of this SMM metric, you need to look at each post and track statistics in order to find out which posts get more likes, which leave more comments, and which get more shares. For example, on Facebook and VKontakte, all this data is displayed in the built-in page statistics, while on other social networks you will have to view each article manually.

However, this SMM efficiency parameter has a downside. A large number of likes, reposts and comments may not always contribute to the desired results, for example, sales. Or it could be that the post published yesterday was marked with the lowest engagement rate, but today they wrote to you with a desire to buy a product for an impressive amount. Therefore, this SMM performance indicator should be paid attention to along with others - the growth in the number of subscribers and the coverage of posts.

Do not forget to visit the pages of competitors from time to time and compare their user activity with yours.

Increasing activity during the period of competitions and draws

As you know, various contests, promotions and sweepstakes with valuable prizes are highly favored by users of social networks. The level of all performance indicators (subscriptions, likes, reposts, comments) during this period, as a rule, increases dramatically. And in social media marketing they often rely on this. Of course, among the attracted subscribers there will be a large number of fans of everything free, but still some of them may remain in the group and become the target audience. And their interest and further actions will depend on the quality of the content of your page.

To attract your target audience, come up with a prize that resonates with the theme of your community.

An SMM manager needs to carefully think through all the nuances before the start of a contest/raffle in order to be prepared for a wave of negativity that the community may experience after summing up the results. To avoid this, it is necessary to clearly describe all the points and mention the penalties for those who violate the conditions.

Growth of site traffic from a group in a social network and an increase in traffic

This performance indicator is relevant only if the purpose of SMM promotion is specifically sales, and it is fundamentally important for the company to transfer users from the group to the site. Therefore, the main part of the work of an SMM manager is to increase the conversion on the site and increase traffic from the page on the social network. To do this, each publication mentions the address of the resource, and an active link is placed in the description of the group, or targeted advertising is launched, the main purpose of which is to increase traffic to the site.

You can see how effective the work being done is by installing a statistics counter on the site. And if users consistently follow the link, this means that the KPI in SMM has been achieved.

However, it is important to work not only on the amount of traffic, but also on its quality. As you know, a user who spends more than 15 seconds on your site is considered interested. And what is the use of visitors who did not stay there even 10 seconds, even if there are an impressive number of them? That's right, none. To determine the effectiveness of transitions, the main KPI indicators on the site will help. How to measure them and what services to use, we will consider below.

Tracking KPIs on the site

Such statistical services as Yandex.Metrika and Google Analytics will help to conduct a detailed analysis. Key performance indicators on the site include:

The number of visitors who came from social networks (percentage).
The average time that users spent on the site (if it is 1-3 minutes, then the KPI is considered to be achieved).
bounce rate. This is the percentage of visits to the site, showing how many pages the audience has viewed, and allows you to determine the success of the resource and the quality of the transition. A high bounce rate (from 60% and above) indicates that users are not interested in viewing other pages, and even more so, in buying a product. The reason may lie in the slow loading of pages, inconvenient interface, uninteresting or irrelevant content.
The number of pages viewed per session. This metric again indicates whether the visitor is interested and how much.
The percentage of users who completed the desired action (purchase, registration on the site, subscription to the newsletter, etc.) and revenue per client.

If, when analyzing the effectiveness of SMM, none of the indicators meets your expectations, you need to pay attention, as mentioned above, to the quality of the content and the site interface. If everything is in order with him, the SMM manager should reconsider the parameters of the target audience when launching an advertising campaign.

Economic indicators of SMM promotion

As a rule, the more users in the group, the less money should be spent on attracting each new subscriber. The largest sums for advertising campaigns usually go at the initial stage of promotion. And if there is a steady increase in subscribers, coverage grows and activity in the group increases, but the budget for social media marketing does not exceed the allowable norm, then the economic performance indicator is normal: the SMM specialist knows how to properly distribute funds and understands the audience.

The number of targeted actions performed by users

The attendance of the group, as such, is not of great importance for the company. It is much more important to know whether subscribers perform the actions for which SMM promotion is carried out, and how recognizable the brand is in the market. Target actions include:

Registration on the site.
Newsletter subscription.
Online call and communication with a consultant.
Completing a survey or other form.
Downloading materials.
Sending a request for something.
Making a purchase (if it is an online store).
Attendance of the institution (if it is a restaurant, sports club, hotel, etc.).
Letter to direct/personal.
Go to the "Contacts" page.

In this case, when analyzing the effectiveness of SMM, two indicators are measured: the total number of actions taken and the number of users who took the action.

Conclusion

It is very difficult to measure the effectiveness of SMM promotion, analyze and evaluate the effectiveness of a specialist's work manually, so it is better to resort to automated monitoring services that will help you quickly get the necessary data. These include built-in statistics services in social networks and statistics counters for websites (Yandex.Metrica, Google Analytics).

Each business can use its own, individual set of the above KPIs. It is important to remember that it is difficult to accurately assess the effectiveness of promoting your brand on social networks using only one of them - you need to use these tools in combination. They will help to identify whether SMM promotion is going in the right direction, what is interesting for your target audience, what should be changed and improved in the group/community, and what is better to refuse.

This article is relevant not only for companies, brands and business owners, but also for SMM managers and job seekers who want to try their hand at social media marketing.

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Metrics for evaluating the dynamics of subscribers

Let's start with metrics that reflect the dynamics of subscribers and, therefore, the effectiveness of the SMM strategy as a whole.

Number of followers (Followers)

Perhaps the most famous metric in SMM: it is widely used in reports, put as a KPI. Of course, followers can be cheated, but such cheating is easy to calculate.

If there are suspicions, it is necessary to study the accounts of newcomers - bots and "dogs" are immediately visible. At the same time, it is worth comparing the geography, age and other important data of new subscribers with portraits of the target audience. Characteristics differ greatly - questions to the SMS.

Read more about the independent search for bots in social networks and services for identifying fake accounts in the article by Dmitry Dementy.

Formula: (number of new subscribers / total number of subscribers) * 100%.

The formula can also be improved by substituting into the numerator net increase: the difference between the number of new subscribers and the number of those who left the community. This will make it easier to assess the interest of the audience, the relevance of posts and the effectiveness of advertising, if it is included.

Number of views (Views)

For reports, as a rule, a summary indicator is used: the number of views on all community posts for a certain period.

Reach

Reach measures the number of people who have had at least one contact with a community post(s).

As in the case of the previous indicator, in general, customers are reported on the total coverage. It is considered separately if there is an intermediate task: to compare the effectiveness of several posts.

Viral Reach directly depends on the interest in the content, paid reach from the advertising budget. On the organic reach the number of subscribers and the frequency of publishing content affects, but there is also an irresistible force - ranking algorithms in social networks.

If KPI's are limited to the dynamics of subscribers and posting, Peakfeed is suitable for tracking. He knows how to work with 8 social networks (VK and OK, however, are not included in the list). The cost is from $5 per month.

Tracking most important metrics - subscribers, reach, views, and engagement metrics (which will be discussed in the next section) - is best handled by Livedune. Tariffs start from 195 rubles. Livedune knows how to work with all Russian social networks and even LiveJournal.

Audience Feedback Metrics

Now about the metrics that reflect various user reactions. Likes (likes), comments (comments), shares or reposts (shares)- the simplest, well-known, but not the only indicators for assessing audience feedback.

Attractiveness level (Love Rate)

Likes in terms of audience size. Formula: Likes / Followers * 100%.

The level of sociability (Talk Rate)

Comments in terms of audience size. Formula: Comments / Followers * 100%.

Amplification Rate

Synonymous with growth rate. Formula: Shares / Posts (number of posts) * 100%.

AR characterizes the virality of content. The higher the indicator, the greater the free reach and the cheaper it is to attract subscribers.

Sometimes likes, shares, comments and coefficients for them are not counted separately, but they take a more general indicator - engagement volume (Engagement Volume). Formula: Likes + Comments + Shares.

Audience Engagement Rate (ER)

There are several ER formulas.

One calculation option is to take the number of community members who have made at least one engagement (like / repost / comment), then divide it by the total number of subscribers.

There is also such a formula: (sum of all engagements / number of subscribers) * 100%.

Advice to specialists from Daria Samoilova, SMM manager at Netology: “If you report on subscriber growth, try to show it in conjunction with ER. Because the best guarantee of the absence of bots and "dead souls" is a growing or at least not falling engagement in your account. It is important".

The disadvantage of the indicator is that it is subjective: it does not take into account reach, engagement on specific days, and interaction with individual posts. Therefore, experienced texters use several subspecies of ER.

Engagement Rate by Reach (ERR)

Formula: (number of engagements / coverage) * 100%.

The metric shows the approximate share of those who have seen community posts and reacted to them in one way or another.

Engagement per day (Daily Engagement Rate, ER Day)

Formula: (number of engagements per day / number of subscribers) * 100%.

Daily engagement shows how many times a day the average subscriber has been active.

Engagement Rate of Post (ER Post)

Formula: (sum of engagements per 1 post / number of subscribers on the date of publication) * 100%.

The indicator allows you to evaluate interest in specific publications, compare posts with each other in terms of effectiveness.

Engagement Rate by Views (ER View)

Formula: (number of engagements per 1 post / number of views) * 100%.

You need to be careful with conclusions on this indicator, because social networks do not count unique views.

Average response time (response time)

The metric reflects the time required by the community administration / brand representatives to respond to messages from the audience. This is an important indicator of the quality of service, respect for customers.

To estimate the average response time over time, you can use the following formula: (response time for the previous period / response time for the reporting period - 1) * 100%.

Response Rate

The metric shows the percentage of questions that users received an answer to. Formula: (number of answers / number of questions) * 100%.

According to JagaJam's Russia data, brands are slow to respond and don't even answer half of the questions.

Conclusion: with the help of quality service, you can overtake most competitors.

For regular monitoring of responsiveness, the same JagaJam is suitable. It can collect statistics on both your brand community and competitor groups. In addition to the response rate, the service can calculate subscriber dynamics, engagement, and other important SMM indicators. The Personal tariff plan in JagaJam is 2,700 rubles per month.

There is also a foreign service for improving the quality of customer service in social networks - CX Social. It monitors publications with a mention of the brand and notifies them in time. Pricing unknown, but a demo can be requested.

Metrics to measure traffic and conversions

The metrics from the previous sections are mostly about the inner workings of SMM. Businesses are interested in sales. We tell you how you can evaluate the efforts of an SMS person to bring the audience to a purchase.

Important: you can’t set KPIs for sales, as they are influenced by many other factors that are not dependent on SMM.

Liya Kanarskaya, a remote SMM manager, says: “Very often, you can hear the following from potential clients:

“Ten thousand will make a hundred thousand profit?”
"Do you guarantee plus 1,000 subscribers?"
"We'll pay you a percentage of sales."

But SMM affects sales and profits only indirectly. Social networks do not form the need of consumers, it is just one of the channels of brand communication.”

Traffic from social networks (Social Traffic).

It’s definitely not worth it in the first 2-3 months after the creation of the community to set strict requirements for the traffic to the site for the SMS. Keep in mind that it takes time to form trusting relationships: new subscribers are in no hurry to follow links to unfamiliar sites.

Conversion rate or click-through rate (Click-Through Rate, CTR).

A basic indicator in online marketing, it is used at almost all stages of the sales funnel.

CTR in SMM can be calculated as follows: divide the number of clicks on the link by the number of post impressions, and multiply the result by 100%. If the site is promoted by targeted advertising, click-through rate is calculated in the same way: ad impressions are simply substituted into the denominator.

Cost Per Click (CPC).

This indicator is known to everyone who has ever set up targeted or contextual advertising. However, CPC can also be calculated for general SMM using the following formula: all costs of maintaining social networks / number of clicks to the site.

The number of leads (Leads).

The metric shows the number of contacts of potential customers, that is, the number of applications / orders / calls received using social networks.

Cost per lead (Cost Per Lead, CPL).

Formula: (sum of expenses / number of leads).

Leads and CPL are easy to calculate when managers process leads using social media apps. Try to offer potential customers as many options for ordering as it is not convenient for everyone to fill out forms on landing pages, put goods in the baskets of online stores.

Once again, we will touch on the topic of the number of KPIs.

Especially for Texterra, Daria Samoilova, SMM manager of Netology, spoke about her experience:

“For me personally, 5 metrics are optimal: traffic to the site, conversion to leads, subscriber growth, reach, Engagement Rate. This is a necessary basis from which, without further ado, the effectiveness of the work is visible.

Someone adds to the ER a breakdown by communication, amplification, engagement indexes - that is, they count comments, reposts, likes separately. Then you can get eight metrics.”

Work period.
Number of community members (as of the report generation date).
Growth of subscribers in 1 month.
Full coverage of the audience.
The number of unique visitors.
The total number of post views.
Number of posts (messages).
News update frequency.
Top 5 popular posts (by reach).

So, you have created a Twitter profile for your company, groups on Facebook and Vkontakte are also in business. You answer (really?) questions from your potential customers, use scheduling services to post content on social media at the perfect time, follow your target audience on Twitter to get 8-15% of your coveted follow-backs, thank your fans for their support.

But other than that, what are you doing to track the effectiveness of social media activities and increase traffic and sales? If you engage your audience on social networks, you must be able to calculate the final output. How else will you understand if you are working in the right direction and if your target audience wants to hear and interact with you?

It sounds heavy, but calculating social media marketing performance metrics is easier than you think, given metrics such as engagement rate, reach and follower growth (Reach and Follower Growth), customer acquisition (Acquisition), and associative and direct conversions ( Assisted and Direct Conversion).

Evaluating the effectiveness of social media marketing

Engagement rate

Let's start with the well-known engagement rate. To understand whether your content is interesting to your audience, you can track engagement metrics such as the number of comments (conversation), approval or number of likes (applause), number of reposts (amplification). These metrics show the total amount of activity on your social media accounts. Do they mean anything in and of themselves?

Considering separately the number of likes, reposts, comments, as well as the number of subscribers, one can encounter a misleading “theater of success”, in which the growth of individual metrics (from the number of likes to the number of subscribers and registrations) is seen as an undoubted indicator of the effectiveness of social media marketing. In reality, these indicators, isolated from other data, do not affect anything other than the WOW effect.

In turn, the total number of these metrics (volume) can be used to calculate more important indicators: the engagement rate and (in some cases) the cost of engagement.

The engagement rate answers two main questions:

How relevant and interesting is the content you post?
Are you talking to people who really want to hear from you?

Depending on the final information you want to get, you can calculate the engagement of your audience by dividing the total number of likes, shares and comments for a certain period by the total reach, the number of subscribers:

Engagement / Total Reach

Calculating the engagement rate depending on the reach of your publications (both among subscribers and third-party audiences) is great for assessing the quality of content, but may no longer adequately reflect the situation with a significant increase in reach.

Engagement / Subscribers on a specific date

This method of calculation gives you a relatively stable indicator at the output, which allows you to assess how engaged your already established audience is. By calculating it by days and presenting the results in a graph (you can follow the change in the KUKU.io SMM service), you can evaluate the effectiveness of your content marketing in recent years and, by changing and supplementing it, monitor the growth or fall of engagement.

A formula you've probably come across before:

The engagement rate can be calculated for paid campaigns by dividing the engagement received by the number of post views for a particular post by dividing by the number of posts for a particular day. There are other ways, depending on your goals.

At this stage, for paid campaigns in social networks (promotion of individual publications) can also be assessed cost of involvement (amount of involvement / funds spent). But is this assessment important if you can calculate the cost of a new subscriber who came from this campaign, as well as his conversion to the final goal - registration / purchase, etc.? Most likely, this assessment will be of interest only to the advertising agency and its clients. (correct in comments if wrong).

The engagement rate is affected primarily by content which you post, time in which you post, audience understanding, which you are targeting.

The growth in the number of subscribers also affects the final percentage of engagement, but often in the wrong direction that you can count on. With each new subscriber, the overall characteristics of your audience changes, and by dividing the engagement by the increased number of subscribers and reach, we will get a smaller end result. These indicators should be considered together.

Reach and Follower Growth

Most companies set themselves the main goal of being on social networks. lead generation. But let's start from the beginning. In order to start attracting traffic from social networks to your site or immediately make sales, you need (engaged) subscribers and coverage.

Reach refers to the number of unique users who have seen your content. Reach affects everything: engagement, likes, comments, clicks, feedback, engagement.

Coverage can be certain publication as well as your pages in general. Why is it important to share? By posting once a week, your post may get a lot of reach, but the page reach will be extremely low. If you post too often (let's say 5 times a day), the low reach of individual posts will be offset by the high reach of your page. Should we go to extremes? Of course, it is best to find a middle ground.

On Facebook, reach is also divided into organic(people who saw your post in their feed), viral(friends of the user saw the post in their feed when the user commented on the post or shared it), paid(reach of promoted posts).

One of the trends of recent years is the rapid decline in Facebook's organic reach. And I think the English definition of what's happening on Facebook is incredibly accurate - "pay-to-play" ("pay to play").

Favorite. Potential Reach. Unfortunately, the potential reach offered by social networks is beautiful numbers, divorced from reality. You can post super viral event content, but you won't get close to the impressive numbers that social media is giving you. Your audience growth and engagement metrics, while not as impressive, are a more realistic estimate of potential reach.

To assess potential coverage outside of your followers and increase your audience you can start by counting the number of friends of your engaged followers, the audience score of your competitors, and the count of engaged users who are not yet your followers. Reinforce the information received by user segmentation by engagement and geography, compare portraits of old subscribers and new ones.

By identifying and studying the main groups you need to influence, you can independently assess potential reach and create your own truly effective list of growth hacks for social networks.

Customer acquisition (Acquisition)

Despite the fact that user traffic from social networks in most cases is significantly inferior to organic traffic from search engines, the percentage of repeat visits from social networks is several times higher than Google. You can check it in Google Analytics right now.

Speaking of attracting users from social networks, it is impossible not to start with frequency of visits to your site. The metric divides your website visits into two main categories: new and repeated. While repeat clicks reflect the performance of your content on social media and audience engagement, new clicks show whether by increasing “reach” you actually get more clicks.

What can influence the attraction of users from social networks? Of course, first of all, this content, which you publish, and then, how do you interact with your audience.

Among the many strategies for increasing conversions from social networks, I find the following particularly interesting:

Twitter.

Participation in chats on Twitter. Twitter chats are a great opportunity to chat with a large number of people who are (or might be) interested in your product at the same time. The more you chat on Twitter, the more you get recognized. Also you can use chat rooms to promote your blog articles, relevant to the topic of the chat. you can find a large list of popular chats.

Influence on opinion leaders. Find influencers in your field and people who frequently mention keywords you're interested in and add them to your private Twitter lists. Contact 2-3 people on your list per day. In this case, the tweets don't necessarily have to be related to your brand and may touch on related topics. If you still want to post links to your site without looking like a spammer, try linking to useful content on your blog.

Facebook and Vkontakte.

80% of users social media prefer to contact brands through Facebook and Vkontakte. Why? Because it's faster than via email. 50% expect to receive support on social media, and only 23% of brands present on social media actually provide it. You have probably heard that the experience of bad support flies very quickly. But fortunately, positive experiences spread very quickly too, word of mouth is triggered. Users want to communicate with you through social networks, so give them the opportunity to do so.

For LinkedIn main attraction strategies can be finding and meeting influential people, participation in group discussions, repost your blog posts etc..

All social media acquisition strategies really deserve their own column. But I would like to return to the evaluation of effectiveness. Will you take the quality of the relationships you build as a criterion? No. When talking about efficiency and ROI, you are comparing money and time spent with specific goals achieved.

Because any built relationship with the audience on social networks is useless without conversion. Therefore, if you decide to measure referral traffic from social networks, take one more step and measure the final conversion in registration or purchase.

Direct and associated conversion (Conversion)

Let's start this block with four main ways that social media users can come to your site:

Social network > Direct link to the site
Social > Blog article with a link to the main page > Lead
Social network > Gated content (in order to get to an article or download something, you need to log in or leave information about yourself) > Lead
Social network > Blog article > Registration form posted on the blog

The paths are different and not all will instantly lead to the desired effect - registration, sale, etc. Before you attract users to your site and make them return, you must clearly define your ultimate goal: what kind of conversion do you want to see into sales or other desired actions?

At the same time, you need to decide for yourself that transitions and conversions will not be achieved exclusively by selling posts, because the constant posting of such content is the surest way to lose an audience.

To begin you can calculate the conversion from the last click, transitions from social networks following your links, attaching UTM tags to them. But direct referrals don’t give the full picture of how effective you are at building relationships and building a social media audience loyal to your brand.

Most of your posts and tweets won't make you a sale, but you can close the target with potential customers who visit your site again. At this point, there are Google Analytics Assisted Conversions:

Assisted conversions happen when a user goes to your site, then exits without converting, but then comes back and does it anyway. The higher these values, the more the social network contributes.

By comparing Assisted Conversions with Google Analytics Last Click Conversions, you can determine which social networks are ideal for maintaining relationships with existing customers, and which are ideal for leading and closing new transactions.

So, when you know and are able to calculate these indicators, the activity of your subscribers in social networks ceases to be an ephemeral indicator of effectiveness, a "theater of success", and becomes the basis for calculating engagement and ROI, assessing the quality of incoming traffic, as well as the effectiveness of your content marketing.

Yes! Yes! Yes! We, too, have already seen new reactions on Facebook. But these are just details: now the reputation and intonation of subscribers can be analyzed even more sophisticatedly. And many SMM workers are now graying over their reports, trying to figure out how to present this more convincingly to the client. (And how to explain the number of negative reactions).

But: the material is not about that. Whatever emo likes they come up with, the essence does not change. Entertain and make friends. Make friends and get involved. Engage and sell. Well, everything else that we want from SMM.

Dmitry Rumyantsev no need to present. You just have to read carefully and draw your own conclusions. We believe that singling out SMM as a separate independent activity is a temporary growth error. And email marketing, and blogging, and SMM (and even SEO) are somehow pulled into the overall marketing strategy. You can call it digital, complex, web marketing, the essence does not change. The company must broadcast a single message across all channels. You need to produce content and choose how to communicate it based on the product and the market, and not on the methods of communication. Therefore, read carefully: the day is not far off when every marketer who values a slice of salmon on his sandwich will need to understand these KPIs.

I am constantly asked what KPIs are in SMM. Here is an article for you on the subject.

For those who don't know, KPIs are Key Performance Indicators. Based on these indicators, you can track how well the company is doing promotion work or how competently a full-time specialist works. Each niche has its own. For example, in SEO, they can be position in search engines, increase in traffic or increase in orders through the site.

What can be KPIs and what are the pitfalls in their evaluation? Let's see the top ten.

1. Growth in the number of subscribers/community members

One of the main and frequently used parameters. If community advertising is effective and the group is managed adequately, then the number of members should constantly grow. Often the customer sets the task of recruiting a certain number of people per month. After passing the testing period of the main advertising channels, where you roughly estimate how much one user will cost you, you say how much it will cost the customer.

The indicator, of course, is one of the most accurate. But there is one “but”: it is pretty spoiled by the fact that many unscrupulous performers used (and continue to do so now) black or gray methods for growth. That is, in fact, they filled the group with tons of offers or bots. Or they used friending followed by an invite to the group. As a result, the group grows, KPI is achieved, but there is no effect - there is no activity, a loyal audience does not gather, sales do not increase.

If you use this parameter, then it only makes sense if the target audience recruited by white methods is growing in the group. For example, targeted advertising or advertising posts. And even in this case, it is necessary to discuss the same age, gender and city. Because the group can be recruited by white methods and schoolchildren from Ukraine. If you are a customer, then such things must be discussed immediately before starting work on the project. At the same time, I advise you to regularly look at the statistics, namely the sources of transitions. In the case of white methods, there will certainly be transitions from advertising and news.

2. Growth in reach

If a group is recruited by white methods and is regularly maintained, then, of course, its reach will grow. That is, the number of people who will see the news of your project in the feed. You can focus on this indicator and even calculate the price for every 100-1000-10000 people. You can use both subscriber coverage and full coverage, although the latter is less accurate, as it often involves a non-target audience.

With all the pluses, the coverage indicator is rather crafty. As I already wrote in the analysis of statistics, it strongly depends on the number of publications and does not show at all whether at least someone reads this news or just scrolls through the feed without looking. If you make one good quality post, you can get tons of likes and comments, but little reach because there is only one post. Conversely, good coverage - but absolutely no content.

In a word, from my point of view, it makes sense only in conjunction with other parameters.

3. Group attendance growth

If the project does not have a website or all business is carried out exclusively in a group, then community attendance can be used as an indicator of effectiveness. However, there is an important nuance - traffic as an indicator makes sense only after the main advertising campaign (when it stabilizes). Otherwise, you will begin to evaluate the non-target audience (or pay for it), because many will simply pass by. It will take about a week of active advertising. Accordingly, for the same reason, it makes no sense to take into account the number of visitors per month - traffic that has nothing to do with you will be mixed in.

In dynamics, you can consider the percentage increase in attendance. Let's say that at the beginning of the ad, organic traffic was 20 people per day. After a month of showing targeted ads and posts in communities, traffic became 100 people a day, that is, it increased by 500%. To enhance this parameter, you can estimate how much traffic goes to the group from the source "My groups" or "Direct links". The more traffic from there, the better (of course, if it is not cheated), as this shows how many people consciously enter the community and read the content. By the way, it is possible to set the task that there should be at least 60% of such people. And pay for them (if you pay for traffic) more.

4. Growth of site traffic from the group

Traffic from the group can be transferred to the site. For example, publish the beginning of an article in a group, but it can only be read in its entirety on the main resource. By installing any statistics counter, you can clearly calculate the traffic. This is especially true for content projects. If you see that the attendance of a resource from social networks is growing, then the KPI is being fulfilled.

So, I know some guys whose task is to get 30 thousand users a day from their VKontakte communities. What they successfully do.

However, this parameter can play a cruel joke if the quality of the traffic is not evaluated. Although sometimes it doesn't matter. Suppose customers sell ads on the main site and it is important for them to show advertisers beautiful numbers, but they don’t care about quality. In most cases, it is better to use the parameter, which I will talk about next.

5. Growth of traffic to a site with certain quality indicators

There is no sense from users who will go to your site and stay there for only 10 seconds. Therefore, you can initially put certain behavioral metrics into attendance from social networks. For example, the bounce rate is no more than 15, the average time on the site is at least 2 minutes, the number of pages viewed is 3-4.

Moreover, traffic does not have to come from your group. Although maybe only from it. You can transfer visitors directly to the site using promotional posts or targeted advertising. Just in this case, traffic must meet certain behavioral characteristics.

6. Achievement of goals or number of hits

This is one of the most accurate indicators, which is very fond of most customers. Indeed, in fact, most businessmen need sales or at least calls. Social networks are another additional channel for obtaining them. A group may have minimal reach, little traffic, no activity, but regular leads. Yes, imagine. I have a project where, in a group positioned by a brand with a distinct USP, people immediately call or write in a personal message after targeted advertising!

Everyone understands that sales also depend on a bunch of factors, which is why SMM specialists really don’t like to evaluate their work in this way. And, to be honest, I do too. Too often I come across the fact that people simply have not yet learned how to talk on the phone or answer e-mail within 10 minutes. But in addition to sales, there are such targeted actions as:

filling out a contact form;
call;
reaching the cart;
group consultations;
personal appeal;
downloading the required file;
getting a demo version of the product;
view contact page or portfolio.

All of these can be your KPIs. These goals can be achieved both through the project community and without it. You can consider both the growth of the listed indicators, and just a stable amount per month. You can pay both for each target action and for a certain volume.

But most importantly, I repeat, this KPI is loved by many customers and, first of all, they turn to those specialists who can work on them.

7. Growth of an active community core

With the help of certain analytics systems, you can find out the number of the most active users in a group. The so-called "Core Community". Those who constantly participate in discussions, regularly read articles in the group, etc. Sometimes they are also called "fans". It is they who often become brand advocates and launch word of mouth. The growth of their number, in contrast to other "involvements", which I will talk about below, very accurately characterizes the quality of work with the project. Most importantly, it cannot be artificially stimulated.

A large core of loyal users is one of the key indicators of the skill of an SMM specialist. Of all indicators, it is second only to the achievement of goals.

8. Growth in the total number of activities in the group

Many agencies like to show an increase in the number of likes, shares and comments in general as a good result. There is even an ER (engagement rate) engagement rate, expressed in specific numbers. High ER seems to indicate the quality of work.

I don't like this indicator. It, like coverage, is ambiguous. They like humor more often, repost collections with videos, comments can be “dispersed” with the help of admins or the game. All these manipulations will raise ER very quickly, but will it give sales? There are visitors who like everything in a row, without even reading. I noticed a funny situation more than once when I posted an article with 10 thousand characters with analytics, and after a second they liked it. It is clear that the like has nothing to do with the content.