There are 2 types of metrics that need to be established and measured for your social media success:
- Business metrics – these relate to stated social media goals and social media objectives.
- Campaign metrics – these are levers for influencing and delivering on the business metrics.
Business Metrics
Your business metrics for social media can be wide and varied but should align with your social media goals and objectives. With so much data available its important not to get lost on unimportant numbers and to focus on the metrics that matter and provide real and tangible insight into how your social media efforts are performing.
Examples of business metrics that are useful to monitor are:
- Number of new fans / followers / subscribers by social media source (eg Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Blog RSS).
- Growth in total fans / followers / subscribers by social media source. This is the net effect of your new followers minus your unsubscribed followers. This is a critical metric in measuring the value you are providing your audience. You must be growing new audience while retainer your existing followers.
- Number of video views.
- Visitors to your website by social media source. If website traffic is important to your business then this metirc helps quantify your contents ability to generate awareness and interest and refer people through to your site to take the 'next step' in nurture or sales process. If however your goal is to engage with your followers within social media, generating traffic to your website may not be an important metirc to measure.
- New email subscribers by social media source.
- New sales enquires or leads by social media source.
- For eCommerce websites, sales revenue by social media source.
Campaign Metrics
Campaign metrics are used to measure and optimise the levers that effect the quality and performance of your content to deliver on your business metrics. Depending on the social networks your choose to engage through, the number of different campaign metircs you can monitor can be overwhelming. As stated before, focus on the important metrics that provide real and tangible insight.
Some campaign metrics we have found useful to monitor are:
- Interactions - this is easily measured on networks like Facebook which provide insights into the number of wall posts, comments and likes. This can extend to measuring interactions on your blog by way of comments from your audience.
- Twitter specific metrics may include ReTweets and mentions.
- Buzz - the number of mentions your brand, product, service or content is mentioned in conversations.
- Share of Conversation - compared to your competitors, what is your share of the conversation for your industry and category related topics.
- Post click engagement - what are engagement metrics for visitors that come to your website from social media sources. Measuring Bounce Rate, Time of Site and Conversion rates can be provide valuable insights for developing content strategies and landing pages.
- While the actual numbers are useful, it is the monitoring of trends within your data that will provide the highest value insight. Trends take time to develop so don't get hung up if your numbers are bouncing around week-to-week or even month-to-month.
- Proper measurement requires the right plan and the right tools. We've covered off some suggestions for developing your measurement plan, but selecting the rght tools is critical. There are a vast array of both free and paid social media monitoring tools available which we will cover in upcoming post so stay tuned.
This is part 5 of our 10 part Social Media stategy series. In the next post we'll discuss the all important element of content. If you need any further information developing your social media plan, give us a call at Traffika, or just leave a comment below. We'd love you hear from you.
This article was posted by Matt Forman. Matt is Managing Director at Traffika. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mattforman.
