It’s important to prioritize. Setting and tracking too many KPIs will overwhelm you with data and cause confusion.
It’s difficult to set an fixed number of how many KPIs a business, a team or one employee should have in any given industry. Company structure is unique, but according to general practice and professional advice, having between two to four KPIs per goal is recommended [S] .
How to Set up Your Social Media KPIs Correctly?
1. Make sure KPIs are connected to your goals
A sports brand that entered China three years ago wished to improve brand awareness, and it set “reads” on social as its core KPI at first.
“The potential problem is that we were trying to find local fans for our brand, not just reads per content. It’d be easy to hit the KPI, had we just chosen all topics to be what audiences are interested in but not tightly connected to our brand, while the latter is an equally important metric. As we were trying to find a balance, the KPI at the time lost its purpose.” —— manager of the brand’s social media team
Using different social metrics in combination can provide a comprehensive assessment of each stage of the customer journey, while each metric may reveal different insights.
The marketing teams of different brands focus on different social channels and implement different strategies, but in order to achieve business results, brands must understand how social metrics work across each platform, and understand the appropriate stage of the customer journey. Only then can the right message be delivered at the right time.
KAWO’s Guide to China Social Metrics will combine social metrics with customer journey, and categorize metrics in a systematic way to inspire marketers in their daily efforts.
WeChat is one of the most established social platforms in China. Even though the open rate for Official Accounts (“OA”) has been declining for years due to fierce competition for readers’ attention, high-quality content remains the most efficient tool for maintaining audience stickiness.
Note: You can find the specific definition of the labeled metrics egorization category in the appendix.
From first hearing about a brand to becoming a paying customer is always a journey.
A company should choose a range of KPIs that measure different stages of the marketing funnel to ensure it’s not losing customers somewhere along the way.
Awareness: Capture the attention of people who have never heard of your brand before and getting them to connect and follow one of your official channels – what do be aware of
Consideration: Build trust with existing followers through informing and educating them about your brand and products – what to be aware of
Purchase: Get customers to the point where they trust you enough to hand over their hard-earned money to your company – what to be aware of
Loyalty: Build a long-term connection with your customers which brings them back to buy again and requires much less effort than acquiring a new customer – what to be aware of
Advocacy: Customers trust you so much that they recommend you to their friends, family and colleagues – what to be aware of
Each marketer’s role, or the whole marketing team possibly just focus on one step of the funnel, so feel free to skip to the part that are most relevant to you.
This Guide will help marketers understand where each platform sits in the marketing funneland how metrics and KPIs can be translated into actual business success
China’s social media platforms are diverse, unique and present a challenge for brands who are investing millions in reaching your audience, but may not have the right tools to measure results and impact. We hope that this Guide to China Social Metrics will present brands with a framework to understand the Chinese social media landscape and allow you to astutely leverage each platform across the customer journey – be it in China, or among the millions of Chinese diaspora around the world that uses these platforms.
Overview of Mainstream Chinese Social Platforms
With the social media landscape in China constantly changing, it is imperative to have a broad understanding of the ecosystem before diving deeper into how success is measured across platforms. In the Guide, KAWO provides a snapshot of the current state of Chinese social platforms along with the type of content popular with Chinese consumers.
According to Statista, with around 57.7 billion yuan in user traffic value, Douyin became the most valuable short video app in China as of June 2023. The platform has over 400M active users daily, of whom over 250M consume content for more than one hour on a daily basis.
Similar to TikTok, Douyin’s recommendation algorithm is a complex system that combines multiple machine learning techniques to deliver relevant and personalized content to users.
For creators and brands who are seeking to succeed on Douyin, it’s a must to understand the recommendation algorithm, which is “Tag” to “Tag” in essence:
If you are a user, the types of video content you see on Douyin are determined by your interests described by roughly 150 tags, based on your browsing preferences. As your interests change, Douyin’s algorithm adapts, allowing you to see content that corresponds to your interest tags.
In the same way, as a creator or brand on Douyin, you will also be attributed to about 150 tags, and the same rule will apply when your content changes.
The next step is quite intuitive. As you may have guessed Douyin will match users’ tags with creators’ tags. Upon matching, the algorithm will determine whether or not to further recommend the content to a wider pool of users. This is all based on the performance data of the content. Douyin evaluates your video before recommending it with the following 5 key metrics:
