Image source: Jason Howie via Flickr
Proper social media measurement enables marketers to determine what type of content and tactics works best. Marketers need measurement to track their progress and to show how marketing programs contribute to meeting their organization’s overall goals. Without measurement, marketers are flying blind, relying on their gut feelings rather than data.
Selecting the right metrics enables the greatest insight. After you begin tracking chosen metrics, your marketing activities begin to become more meaningful. You, and hopefully senior executives, learn the value of social media.
Attempting to apply the selected metrics to a myriad of different marketing approaches can be a major challenge, especially for larger brands and companies with multiple brands. A social media dashboard can save your team time and provide real-time access to trending metrics by aggregating data from multiple sources and displaying an overall view of a brand’s performance.
These are some of the most common and most useful social media metrics.
Incoming web traffic from social. “This metric is one of the most important that you can monitor, because it tells you exactly what kind of impact your social media is having on your overall site traffic,” advises social media marketer Alex Sobal at Weidert Group. Analyzing posts by network or date/time can pinpoint the posts and social networks that perform best. If you notice a spike on a certain day or network, look at the posts you shared to find successful topics and strategies.
Brand image. Establishing and maintaining a high-quality brand reputation is essential for a successful business. And while social media can help promote your brand, negative comments can quickly damage an organization’s image. “Thus, understanding the brand sentiment on social is vital for any marketer,” emphasizes Swapnil Bhagwat, digital marketing expert with Orchestrate Technologies. Most social media platforms provide at least some level of analytics, he notes. However, organizations need a social media monitoring service to measure brand sentiment across all social networks, online forums and online publishers.
Reach. Reach describes the number of people who may have viewed your content. To gauge reach, consider followers, and blog visitors, as well as follower growth rate. Reach can become misleading, if brands don’t consider the quality of their followers. Many followers may not be your target audience. Some might not even be real people.
Engagement. Engagement, also called feedback, interactions or comments, comprises the two-way communication by which your audience confirms that you are (or are not) providing worthwhile content. If you have no engagement, you’re either not building the right kind of community, or you’re not giving them the content that interests them. “Either way you will never know what works if you don’t have an idea of the level of engagement your social activity engenders,” says Shelly DeMotte Kramer, CEO of Futurum Research + Analysis, in a LinkedIn post.
Shares. Shares, also called amplification, include retweets on Twitter and repins on Pinterest. Some consider shares a form engagement, but they are in fact more beneficial than other types of engagement. These actions share content to a wider audience, increasing the reach of messages. Shares can directly or indirectly aide customer retention and development. It’s important to factor in that some amplifications can be negative.
Conversions. Conversions encompass those people who enter the lead generation funnel by completing an action such as completing forms for online lead generation, registering for webinars, or downloading white papers or e-books. Integrating Google Analytics into your website allows tracking of those activities. Build trackable links into social media posts and monitor those links in Google Analytics, Bhagwat says. You can also create goal tracking to record online conversion.
Assisted conversions. A Facebook post or other social media post may refer a visitor to your website, but the customer may not convert until weeks later. If you don’t track those multi-touches and report such assisted conversions, you won’t know the true value of social media marketing in lead generation, Kramer says.
“Whether your business is small or large, it’s clear that social media measurement is still something of a mystery to many B2B businesses, but it needn’t be,” Kramer says. “By monitoring activity, tying it to leads and conversions, and in the process proving the worth of campaigns, B2B marketers can persuade their senior executive peers that social media marketing is undoubtedly an essential part of the overall business strategy.”
Bottom Line: Implementing an effective social media measurement program with the right metrics can help prove the value of social media and assist in determining the most effective social media strategies.
William J. Comcowich founded and served as CEO of CyberAlert LLC, the predecessor of Glean.info. He is currently serving as Interim CEO and member of the Board of Directors. Glean.info provides customized media monitoring, media measurement and analytics solutions across all types of traditional and social media.
