Hubsopt wants to talk about setting social media KPIs. Once you’ve created a buyer persona and mapped out some S-M-A-R-T goals, you can do a deeper dive and determine what key performance indicators, or KPIs, you should be targeting in your social media strategy.
A KPI is a quantifiable measure used to evaluate the success of an organization, employee, or project in meeting objectives for performance. Knowing what your KPIs are from the start will help you make crucial decisions on content, advertising, budget, and other resources you may need. The main thing to consider is how you can develop actionable goals instead of goals of merely reporting a high result on a vanity metric.
And what’s a vanity metric? Simply put, a vanity metric is a surface-level metric made up of numbers or statistics that seem great when viewed in a presentation but don’t correlate to business success. For example, follower count is probably one of the fluffiest of the various KPIs. Having as many followers as possible may look impressive, but if they aren’t the right people following you — the ones who will buy your products and services — then that follower count is essentially only a vanity metric.
To set the right KPIs, you need to go back to your business goals. If your goal is to increase sales, vanity metrics such as numbers of likes, shares, retweets, followers, and page views are not going to be the most important metrics for you to measure.