Social Media Referrals Are the Most Important Metric You’re Not Tracking

Social Media Referrals Are the Most Important Metric You’re Not Tracking

What is the most important key performance indicator (KPI) for measuring success on social media? Likes, retweets, and shares? Not necessarily. While these metrics tell a story, they don’t equate to tangible sales.

Engagement, rather, is the holy grail of social media marketing. Given the immense benefits of peer-to-peer referrals, measuring customer loyalty via engagement metrics is critical to determining the success of your brand’s messaging.

The KPI can be reduced to one simple question: “How likely are you to refer this brand to your friends?” Those who indicate they would do so are your brand ambassadors.

This metric is important for a number of reasons, especially given that customer referrals have become a major driver of revenue for online and offline brands. After all, who are you more likely to trust with your purchasing choices: a company message or a recommendation from a close friend?

If you’ve implemented the right referral software into your marketing strategy, then measuring brand advocacy can be accomplished with little effort. The first step is monitoring customer feedback and satisfaction—ultimately, this means asking your customers straight up if they’d refer your brand to a friend.

But some fans need a bit more than phenomenal customer service. Implementing an incentivized referral system is the most effective way of prompting more referrals from your biggest fans. While your fans are referring your brand because they trust and cherish it, adding a cherry on top in the form of rewards will propel promoters to evangelize your brand even more and across the vast web of social media activity.

So what are you waiting for? Developing KPIs for customer referrals is a key step to measuring the effectiveness of your brand’s messaging and the ROI of your social media marketing programs.

Are you optimizing your brand for more customer referrals?