How to evaluate the work of an SMM specialist

Businesses go to social networks for sales. Is the SMM specialist directly responsible for them? Sales are influenced by many factors. People don't buy because of creative content or optimized ad impressions. People buy because they are convinced that this product is useful to them.

Your job is to create a good product, the job of an SMM specialist is to talk about it well on social networks. How can you evaluate whether an SMM specialist or agency is worth the money?

This is where KPIs come to the rescue - key performance indicators. KPIs in SMM are important for both parties, both the SMM specialist and the customer. They are determined at the stage of drawing up a promotion strategy in social networks. KPIs will help an SMM specialist to navigate his work, define his own tasks and understand the customer’s expectations. The customer needs to receive measurable criteria for assessing the effectiveness of cooperation.

What KPIs can be tracked in SMM?

Number of subscribers. The most common metric, the most obvious KPI for SMM. However, remember that this KPI can be easily hacked by increasing subscribers and likes. And a dead audience, although it pleases the ego, does not bring profit.

Number of unsubscribes. A completely logical metric that will help assess the interest of subscribers in the content in the account and in how communication is built. If there are a lot of unsubscribes, this is a signal that something is wrong, and it makes sense to reconsider the content strategy or change the tone of voice.

Publication coverage. Reach is the number of people who saw the account. Reach counts unique views. If a user sees your post ten times, it will still be counted as one interaction in your reach. This is one of the most important KPIs for an SMM specialist who works to increase the number of direct sales.

Views. This generally understandable metric will help evaluate an SMM specialist in terms of the effectiveness of a particular publication. It will help you identify well-performing formats, volumes, and topics of publications, and focus on them. Unlike reach, all views are recorded, not just unique ones.

Traffic to the site from social networks.A good SMM specialist leads a targeted, prepared audience to the site. And already on the site, using analytics systems, you can study how much time a person spent on the site, what he saw, how many pages he visited, what actions he performed.

Lead generation. A more advanced level of KPI in SMM than just “website page traffic”. First, a decision is made on what will be the specific goal, or conversion action. Most often this is a warm contact: a person leaves an email or phone number. The goal could also be:

Direct message

Downloading a file.

Order a sample.

View a specific page.

Growth of the active nucleus. The active core is the subscribers who constantly like, leave comments, and repost. Hypothetically, these are the most loyal customers. In reality, the “active core” is more of an indicator of the usefulness of the content. How it works: a brand gathers a target audience in its community. The subscriber sees useful content and marks it. The more content relevant to the interests of subscribers, the larger the size of the active core.

Engagement. This KPI takes into account overall activity - likes, reposts, comments. Perfect fit for:

Personal blog.

Information business.

Entertainment accounts.

Communities of professional interests.

Increased brand awareness. A metric that came to SMM from PR. Needed by those brands that care about what, how much and how they are talked about. The metric will evaluate the work of SMM in terms of building brand reputation.

Increase in the amount of user-generated content. If people write about you, for example, post a review or a photo of a product, they will either tag you or post your hashtags. Both are easy to track.

ROI. This is a return on investment, and it's clearly about money. Publishing case studies with stories about two hundred registrations three days before the festival is cool, but what if this result was not beneficial to the business? What if the costs for an SMM manager, for content, for advertising were more than all the profit received?

Do you want KPIs to always be met? Start cooperation with us! Contact us and we’ll be happy to help!