Moving The Needle: Choosing The Right KPIs To Drive Community Growth

Growing a company’s social network or digital community is not merely about demonstrating popularity through impressive follower counts, but about making progress in a direction that resonates with the company’s overarching goals.

Strategic alignment is important to ensure that community growth is not just pursued for the sake of appearance but is targeted, sustainable, and beneficial to the company — and builds communities that contribute to key business outcomes. The right metrics or KPIs — when selected and employed effectively — can transform a digital community from a passive audience into an active, engaged fanbase willing to promote and advocate for the brand.

In this 5-minute read, we’ll explore:

The difference between vanity metrics and actionable insights
How to select KPIs that are closely aligned with your goals
The different types of social media KPIs and their uses
Techniques to analyze and derive insights from KPIs
The role KPIs play within a broader social media strategy

Understanding Key Performance Indicators

KPIs in digital community management are not just numbers on a dashboard — they are insights that inform strategic decisions. These metrics play a critical role in gauging the performance of social media strategies over time — helping businesses measure progress against their goals, and identify what works and what needs adjustment.

Focusing on metrics that closely align with business objectives is essential — and it’s important to differentiate between “vanity metrics” and actionable metrics. Vanity metrics, such as total likes, reposts, or followers, look impressive at first glance but don’t necessarily correlate directly to business objectives. As an example, it’s possible to devote time to building a large number of followers, but if few of them are prospective customers, there’s very little value added.

Actionable metrics, on the other hand, provide real insights that can influence business strategies. For instance, the engagement rate — the proportion of an audience that has interacted with a company’s content — is a more substantial metric as it reflects active interest in the products or services being promoted.

As a recent article by Hootsuite points out, it’s not an absolute distinction — the same figure may be a vanity metric for one business and an actionable metric for another, depending on the strategy they are pursuing. The key is identifying which KPIs provide the most accurate picture of performance towards a specific goal.

Key categories of social media KPIs

Social media KPIs can be broadly categorized into four main areas: engagement, growth, performance/reach, and satisfaction/loyalty. Each category plays an important role in understanding different aspects of a business’s impact, engagement, and success within the social media networks or digital communities it is a part of.

Engagement: This category measures the extent to which users are consuming and interacting with the content a business is publishing. Key metrics include likes, comments, shares, and the overall engagement rate. High engagement rates indicate that the content resonates with the audience, fostering a sense of community and connection.

Growth: These metrics focus on the expansion of a digital community, including follower count, growth rate, and churn rate. Monitoring these helps businesses understand how effectively they are attracting and retaining their audience over time and allows them to measure the impact of specific initiatives on overall growth, helping to hone their strategy.

Performance/Reach: These KPIs assess the extent and efficacy of content distribution. Metrics like reach, impressions, and click-through rates fall into this category. They help in understanding the scope of content exposure and its ability to attract new followers, as well as the breadth of brand awareness.

Satisfaction/Loyalty: These KPIs gauge the sentiment and loyalty of the community. Metrics such as frequency of interactions, number of reshares of company posts, and repeat engagement rates provide insights into how positively the community perceives the brand and their likelihood of advocating for it.

Understanding and measuring these different categories of metrics gives businesses a holistic view of their social media strategy’s performance. However, for a data-driven and user-focused approach to community management, it’s important to focus on the metrics that best measure performance directly related to achieving the company’s goals.

Setting goals and aligning KPIs

Setting realistic and specific development goals is the foundation of effective social media or digital community management — and these goals should be closely aligned with the company’s overall business objectives and its stage of development.

For example, a startup might prioritize building a strong community and brand awareness. In this case, metrics like reach, impressions, follower growth rate, and share of voice would be most relevant. An SME focusing on lead generation and sales would benefit more from tracking conversion rates, click-through rates, and cost per acquisition. And an established brand looking to boost retention and customer advocacy should focus on metrics like content resharing or positive brand mentions.

A recent guide by Sprout Social makes a valid point, “KPIs can be metrics, but not all metrics are KPIs.”

While businesses may track a wide range of metrics, the KPIs are the ones most closely tied to an overarching goal — for example the health of the bottom line. It’s important to maintain focus on these, even while keeping an eye on other supporting metrics to track performance in less high-priority areas of the business.

As a business evolves, its strategic objectives and therefore the most relevant KPIs will change. A dynamic approach — with regular reviews of how fit-for-purpose currently tracked KPIs actually are — allows companies to stay responsive to market trends and customer behavior, ensuring sustained growth and relevance.

Leveraging data for strategic decisions

Effective use of data analytics is crucial for refining and adapting social media strategies. Tools ranging from native platform analytics to advanced AI-driven software can provide valuable insights into KPI trends and patterns — for example, an unexpected spike in engagement on a particular type of post can signal the kind of content your audience prefers, guiding future content creation.

The use of analytics extends beyond just observation — it involves actively responding to the insights uncovered, and this is where community feedback becomes invaluable. Direct input from your audience can offer a qualitative dimension to the quantitative data, revealing the sentiments and preferences behind the numbers.

Comments and direct messages can add valuable context to engagement metrics, highlighting what drives positive interactions or pinpointing areas for improvement. By integrating both quantitative data and qualitative feedback, companies can fine-tune their strategies for optimized community engagement and growth.

Integrating KPIs into a comprehensive social media strategy

The integration of KPIs into a broader social media strategy is crucial for success — striking a balance between quantitative, metrics-driven tactics and the qualitative aspects of community building. Focusing solely on the numbers risks missing the human element – the genuine connections and interactions that form the core of any thriving online community.

For example, while engagement metrics provide a useful top-level view of how well a business’s published content is being received, they should be complemented with efforts to understand and interact with the community at a more personal level. This might involve responding to comments, participating in discussions, or creating new types of content based on user feedback.

This type of grassroots-level interaction can be demanding, especially for businesses with limited time and resources. The temptation may be to use as much automation as possible to handle community interactions — but that can lead to disengagement if the audience feels that communications are inauthentic or robotic. An article from Forbes supports this view, suggesting that brands prioritize personal connections, “Messages that are heavily manufactured will stick out like a sore thumb. Post real updates that reflect your genuine personality and the brand, and the likes and comments will come naturally.”

One option is outsourcing some aspects of community engagement — such as KPI management and optimization — especially for businesses without specific in-house expertise in this area. Specialized external teams can bring in fresh perspectives and advanced skill sets, enhancing the overall effectiveness of the company’s social media strategies. These specialists can focus on the more technical aspects of KPI tracking and analysis, allowing the in-house team to concentrate on creative and engagement-focused tasks. Ultimately, the goal is to create a social media strategy that is both data-informed and human-centric — not only hitting the right KPI targets but building a loyal and engaged community that supports long-term business objectives.

Conclusion

Selecting and aligning the right KPIs with business and community goals is crucial to digital community management — not just blindly tracking metrics, but choosing those that genuinely reflect and support strategic objectives. Achieving sustainable community growth is a balancing act — combining the quantitative precision of KPIs with the qualitative nuances of human interaction and engagement. For businesses just starting out, this can present a daunting challenge, especially if they lack in-house experience.

Partnering with an experienced organization such as SourceCX, which understands both the human and technological aspects of community communications and KPI management, can provide the expertise and insight needed to succeed in building engagement organically. In doing so, businesses can ensure their digital communities not only grow but flourish, continuing to contribute to their growth and profitability over the long term.