Follower Projectable Ratios
A new (and useful) social media metric.
The social media marketing space is littered with KPIs and metrics - many helpful, many not. It's into that landscape that I propose adding a new metric to your arsenal: Follower Projectable Ratios.
The concept is simple, but it's application can be powerful.
First, let's start with a definition: a Follower Projectable Ratio is a ratio that can be applied to your social media follower base representing the percentage of followers that will respond in a certain way or take a certain action.
Follower Projectable Ratios are helpful in two ways:
One: For point-in-time looks, you can project the response you'll receive from your social following with any given activation on the channel. This can be helpful is projecting how social, as a channel, will (or won't) ladder up to helping achieve your overall business results.
Two: When looking at these ratios through time, you can understand if your social following response is changing over time. A Follower Projectable Ratio around purchase conversion that decreases over time is an indication that, while you may be gaining followers, those followers may not carry business value if your primary objective is increasing sales. These trends help guard against the bias of simply increasing follower count because they keep you honest on whether or not you're gaining the "right" followers.
Three examples:
1. If you have 10,000 followers and, when you post about a promo code-based sale, 200 of them purchase, your Follower Projectable Ratio for purchase is 2%. Assuming you're able to hold this ratio through time, you can understand the value of each incremental 1,000 followers (that value would be 20 purchases per promoted sale). You can then weigh the cost of gaining 1,000 incremental followers and decide if having access to 20 consumers for upcoming promotion-based sales is worth it to your business.
2. If you have 200,000 followers and, when you drive followers to sign up for your email list, 1,500 of them do so, your Follower Projectable Ratio for email sign-up is 0.8%. If you see this ratio increase over time to 1.8% as you gain/lose followers, you can use this as an indication that the followers you're gaining find your business more relevant and want to hear more from you than the ones you lost.
3. If you have a quarterly objective of selling 5,000 units, 75,000 followers on social media, and a Follower Projectable Ratio for purchase of 1.5%, you can plan for your social channels to contribute 22.5% of the sales objective (1,125). This can help with planning by channel, but also illuminate that 77.5% of the plan is still a gap to be closed through other components of your overall plan.
Thanks for spending time with me in my workshop,
Eric
