What is the “Key Performance Indicator” for Steem Accounts? Thinking Out Loud in this Post…
It’s so important to have a real idea of if your steem activities are paying off. Understanding the “Key Performance Indicator” of your steem account is the first step towards achieving sustainable growth on this site.
What is a Key Performance Indicator
A Key Performance Indicator or KPI is the single piece of data that correlates with your overall success.
With any endeavor, there is a lot of data. For a steem account you have many factors - Steem Power, Reputation, Followers, Post Viewership - these are just the surface level!
It’s hard to know which data is most related to your success. If you could choose to have 500 more followers or 2,000 more SP, which is more valuable in the long run? If your posts could get 100 more views on average or $5 more payout, which is a bigger indicator of long-term success?
Lots of information can be overwhelming. source: pixabay
KPIs are the answer to that question. But it’s not always easy to figure out what they are.
The Three Pillars of Steem Success
Steem success requires three broad elements: Followers, Viewers, and Payouts.
You need followers because more followers gives you a larger base of support. You need viewers because if nobody is looking at your posts, you aren’t creating real value. And you need payouts because that is what most people want out of steem in the end - money!
These things fuel each other. Posts with a lot of views get you more followers and better payouts. Better payouts get more people to look at your stuff. It’s all tied together.
The Best Way to Measure Steem Growth
I think the simplest piece of data you can use to measure your success is your Projected SP Growth for Next Week.
This is the % that your account will gain SP based on all of your upcoming payouts. You can see yours over at https://steem.supply (warning - there are reports of a background miner on this site so don’t leave it open in the background). Here’s an image of mine right now:
7% projected growth in the upcoming week! Of course that assumes I power up all my liquid SBD. If you are cashing out your liquid half then this number needs to be cut in half.
I think it’s a good goal for any minnow to try and grow by 5% each week. That will compound quickly. It’s a big challenge, but it’s so doable - you can post 3-4 times per day without pissing people off if it’s good content, and that is a lot of “at-bats” to try and earn good rewards.
Projected Weekly SP Growth, is the KPI I will be using from now on. I think it sums up everything about how to succeed at steem in one number.
Question
What do you think? What is your Key Performance Indicator for your steem account? Share your insights in the comments.
I liked this post so much that I came back to it after upvoting and may now have to resteem it. I've been asking questions about PKIs for a while now (well, ever since I joined Steemit). This article actually makes an effort to define them. Kudos, Matt.
That said, I view Projected Weekly SP Growth as equivalent to the accounts receivable balance for a business. The business has down the work for a number of clients, and now it's just waiting for the cash to flow in on existing contracts. But there are so many other indicators that are more solid PKIs, and they depend on the industry. For oil and gas, it's the number of producing wells that are online. For defense contractors, it's the monetary amount of newly signed contracts with the government. For retail, it's the monthly growth of same-store sales. And of course, there is the beta market factor in CAPM to consider. That is, what the overall market does as a whole (due to the overall economy) can have more impact to stock price than the underlying fundamentals of the business firm.
I think we need to do some more digging here to find the PKIs for Steem. I think one way to figure this out would be a thought experiment asking what it would take to maximize revenue on Steemit. To do that, you would want to have a lot of followers with high rep who are also loyal to you (they upvote everything that you post). Also, you would want to maximize the number of articles you post (recognizing that there are diminishing returns to this, as followers start to think of high frequency posting as spam).
If you accept that, then a Steem PKI would be an equation of these variables:
Well, those are the relevant variables for posting revenue. Commenting revenue is another good source, so we need to include:
I'll skip the curation calculation because I don't have experience with that. I suspect it would depend on bots targeting specific high-rep individuals who generate a lot of revenue from their posts.
See how you have six variables now though! That's a lot of different indicators lol. It's really hard to pin it down to one main thing.
I guess the reason I am so focus on SP is that I think whenever a user has more SP, they naturally get more attention. Everybody wants a piece of that vote power lol. Thanks for sharing your thoughts, there is a lot of studying to be done in this area.
I am wondering if it would be better for you to care about how many extra followers you get or your average views. It may also depend on the individual account. For me, I am investing into Steem so but growth potential is screwed when it comes to the amount of SP I can grow per week. For people who have whales constantly upvote them, they could not be growing at all, just have a dedicated whale upvoting them. Yeah, their SP is growing, but is there reach to help others growing at all? I don't think you should base growth off of SP. It should be based off of people reached through your content.
Just my thoughts.
You are definitely right that the most important thing is to have a positive impact on other people. I do find that it goes up and down though, some posts reach a ton of people and others don't and it seems random. In my experience most of the popular users do build up a good stash of SP... maybe that is a coincidence.
A big one in my opinion is quality comments. It shows that people want to engage. It means they bothered to open it, likely they voted, and someone who comments likely also follows.
This is a great one. You are right that a commenter is like a follower except even better. It was awesome when I first noticed people regularly commenting on my content. The ability for comments to earn rewards helps to incentivize it too which is a nice touch...
I guess I'm growing at about 1%/week for now. It's been higher in the past. I'm pretty happy with how I'm doing
Me also i used ussaly steem.supply with steemstats.com..it s very helpful..thanks for the information about your warning.
what's a background miner?
It uses some of your computer's resources to mine for a cryptocurrency. I am not sure about the specifics... just heard some rumors.
it would seem to be a serious accusation..
Yea IDK I just saw a few posts about it the other day. I have no first hand information about it.
you don't think it's irresponsible to pass along unfounded rumors about someone's website? Suppose someone said that about you?
Nope, I think it is a good idea for me to warn users about a possible issue with a site that will eat their system resources. That is the most important thing to me.
https://steemit.com/steem/@julienbh/steem-supply-is-mining-using-your-browser
It's not an unfounded rumor.
edit: Just to be clear mate, I do think it is pass to pass along random rumors. In this case I could've done better by actually linking to the accusation in the post rather than just referencing it. I'll try to do that next time
I just used that site and my AV software flagged it attempting to download malicious code in my browser.
A background miner downloads malicious code on your computer that runs a program to mine another cryptocurrency. Basically, it steals your computing resources (CPU cycles) to mine currency for them, not you.