In the world of marketing, it’s no secret that there are a million acronyms that all seem equally important to remember. You’ve probably felt like you’re swimming in a hypothetical alphabet soup at times, but let us clear things up by telling you about one of the most important and influential acronyms and how IOI uses them to measure success for our clients.

KPI, or key performance indicator, is a type of performance measurement we use to evaluate the success of a campaign or specific project- in this case, social media. We use them to track the progress toward a specific marketing goal, understand the performance of social media posts, and make adjustments to achieve success.

We began managing all social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn) for St. John’s Northwestern Academies in April 2023. Prior to this, their onsite team managed the strategy, content planning, and posting across all channels.

We narrowed down the important KPIs that we wanted to focus on. This included post time and date, the format of the post, impressions (Instagram), reach, engagement, success rate, and follower growth. 

SJNA primarily posted content as it came in throughout the week, but never considered the content’s format, the time of day, or calls to action. Our goal was to increase engagement and reach by using content that would perform well and drive traffic to the website.

Three things we implemented in April that contributed to continual platform growth over the course of four months included:

1. Tailored the content to meet the needs of our followers: We shifted the type of content that was posted from individual photos to photo/video carousels and reels. This led to an increase in engagement from 14.95% in April to 36.52% in just one month.
2. Posted during time windows when followers were most active: After recording our posting times for one month, we discovered the times garnering the most engagement were between 10-11 am and 4-6 pm. Although the engagement growth is slow, it continues to be steady, increasing by an average of 10 engagements month over month.
3. Audited current hashtags and adjusted based on reach: All hashtags can’t be winners and many people will argue that they don’t serve a purpose at all, but we beg to differ! By tracking the engagement on each post and following the analytics, we were able to see which hashtags performed well and which hashtags were underperforming. Utilizing highly engaged hashtags in future copy gave us the opportunity to reach and engage with potential followers while promoting SJNA’s brand.

In the past four months, we have increased the following on SJNA’s Instagram by 18% and LinkedIn by almost 7%. The success rate of our posts across channels also increased from 4.19% to 4.88% in one month.

KPIs can seem overwhelming and it takes time to see true growth in the metrics. To determine which KPIs you should be measuring, evaluate your business goals and objectives to narrow down the analytics that matters most to your progress.

Get started on the right track today and have IOI help grow your business. Get in touch with our team to see how we can help you KO the competition!