There are hundreds if not thousands of metrics you can track in social media. So how do you decide on which ones you want to focus on? I guess that depends on what results you are most interested in.
I’m pretty vocal that if you’re measuring fans and follower growth as a primary metric that you are making a mistake. Not that these numbers are good to look at but they are only for your vanity. As I said in the ROI of Social Media post, this is skill level one.
Measuring Social Media
If you really want to know how your social media efforts are doing, you should be looking at engagement.
Social engagement is not just retweets but covers a few different metrics that I’ll explain here.
Clicks: Knowing how many clicks your social media updates are generating is a key metric. This measurement can tell you what content is resonating and allows you to do further tracking down to the website or landing page level if the link is directed at your pages.
Mentions and ReTweets: Your brand mentions on social media is another metric that you should be tracking. Overall mentions as well as knowing who is mentioning you is important. Being able to identify influencers and advocates should be a priority.
Unique users engaged: This is an interesting social media metric that few applications can track but I’ve found it to be important. Part of showing growth is being able to measure how many new people you’ve engaged with in social channels. This is a primary metric just like how marketing tracks new leads in the funnel.
Incoming messages: Another social media measurement is track is the number of messages that are coming into the brand. These are people that are talking directly to you and not just sharing your content or mentioning you in their updates. This can be incoming to the brand channel or any of the sub-channels that are used. This is another growth metric and should be used to align resources and show trends.
Sent Messages: This is a social media metric that you should be measuring also. Looking at the incoming tweets, mentions and then crossing that with the number of sent messages from your social marketing team you can see if your actually engaged with the people who are communicating with you. Now I’m not going to say that every mention or incoming message requires a reply but you should be paying attention to it and make sure that there is a checks and balance metric on them.
Individual responsibility: One of the things I find very useful is the idea that everyone on the team is responsible for staying engaged and that no one member on the team is carrying all of the burden of communicating with the community. Being able to measure social media updates down to the individual is important. More important is being able to know WHAT updates are being sent by WHO. Not only for crisis control but to see if members on the social marketing team is getting more engagement than others and being able to report on why.
What other metric do you track that should be added to the list?