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Should you include Social Media KPI’s on your dashboard reporting?  The answer for many consumer-focused middle market companies is increasingly becoming “Yes”.

Social media is growing and evolving at an incredible pace.  While many companies now realize the importance of having a social media strategy, some have been slower to realize the importance of measuring their social media activity and including social media KPI’s in their dashboard reporting alongside things like sales, margins, inventory, cashflow and key financial ratios.  Dashboard reporting is custom tailored to the needs of each organization, so the KPI’s to include will vary.  They could be as simple as the number of visitors and page views on your blog, the number of followers on twitter, or fans on Facebook.  You can track these statistics over time and compare them to goals, or to your competition.  On more detailed reports, you can measure the effectiveness of your campaign showing which efforts were most and least successful and how the social media activity translates to sales.  You can mine demographical information and highlight significant fans and followers or significant mentions, good or bad, that appear throughout the social media world.  And, of course, you can report how much you are spending on your social media strategy and calculate your ROI.

There are middle market companies for whom a social media strategy is not important, so not every company should include social media KPI’s in their dashboard reports.  But if you are a CFO at a company where your social media strategy is key, consider adding social media KPI’s into your dashboard and other reports.

What do you think?