There are a lot of things you can measure about you social media efforts. I have compiled a list of 48 KPIs (key performance indicators) that you can consider for you specific activities. One thing to remember is that you should set at least some metrics that indicate if you are turning profit. Otherwise you can reach your KPIs and still loose money.

Now, before you begin be sure to set the baseline. Look at the set of your chosen social media KPIs and and record the current value. These numbers are important but the rate of change is the main indicator for most of these metrics. For example it’s fantastic if you get 1000 followers in a day but not so if you get them over the year.

Concentrate on the rate of change of your chosen key performance indicators. This can be also expressed as a frequency of events. For example you could measure how many comments you get on Facebook per day, week or month.

You can combine several KPIs into one that is more meaningful for you. Ratios, such as comments per blog post, retweets per followers, help you measure audience activity and engagement.

Distribution

What social media channels are you using, how can people reach you, are you visible?

• Followers
• Fans
• Number of mentions
• Reach
• Social bookmarks (SumbleUpon, Delicious)
• Inbound links
• Blog subscribers

Interaction

How likely are followers going to engage, spread your message and interact with eachother?

• Retweets
• Forward to a friend
• Social media sharing
• Comments
• Like or rate something
• Reviews
• Contributors and active contributors
• Pageviews
• Unique visitors
• Traffic from social networking sites
• Time spent on site
• Response time

Influence

How do attitudes change due to the social media activities? This is the branding value that should convert into sales.

• Share of conversation vs competitors
• Net Promoter
• Satisfaction
• Sentiment positive, neutral or negative
• Number of brand evangelists

Action and ROI

How many sales and other real world result do you get from social media?

• Conversions (email subscriptions, downloads, install widget or tool, etc)
• Sales revenue
• Registered users
• Issues resolved and resolution rate
• Number of leads (per day, week, month)
• Cost of lead
• Lead conversion rate
• Cost of sale
• Revenue (per follower, lead, customer)
• Lifetime value of customers
• Support cost (per customer in social channels)
• Share of repeat customers (from social media vs other channels)
• Transaction value per customer
• Money in the bank, net profit, etc

Internal

The raw output of your social media team. It is important to measure if increases in your input produce similar or better increase in the other KPIs. And, of course, your boss probably wants to know how much are you spending

• Blog posts
• E-books
• Presentations
• Videos
• Facebook updates
• Tweets
• Forum posts
• Social media marketing budget
• Social media staff payroll
• Social media development costs

You can get most out of these social media metrics if you benchmark them against you competition. Whenever possible try to find out the competitor’s numbers and you get a better insight of your performance. If you have 3,141 followers on Twitter the the number is meaningless, but in context of your competitor having 2,718 you may get some insights.

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Image credit Brooks Elliott