Social media is notoriously immeasurable. As a social media marketer, how do you determine if your efforts are working? Social can seem like an impossible hurdle when it comes to analysis but you have to change your thinking if you want to dig deeper.
Here are eight different metrics you can use to determine if your social efforts are worth all the time and money you’re spending. And remember, social data is best measured over time. Don’t expect numbers to jump overnight as the overall goal using social for marketing is to establish a solidly loyal base of followers.
8. Followers, Fans, and Friends:
By far the easiest metrics to keep track of are those each networking site keeps for you. Facebook friends, Twitter followers, and even LinkedIn connections all mean something. They should be monitored regularly but what’s more important here is a loss, not a gain. Social fans will naturally grow over time but be concerned if you see a large drop.
7. Customer Representation:
This metric’s going to take some work. Use existing polls or social networks’ public information to determine where your target market is congregating. If you’re putting 90% of your effort into Facebook, for example, and 70% of your customers primarily used YouTube to make purchasing decisions, you’re in the wrong boat. Find out where you clients are and follow them there.
6. Klout Score:
Klout is a controversial service but one any decent social media marketer can’t ignore. Klout is a service that assigns your brand a “score” based on many different social metrics (i.e. Twitter mentions, Facebook engagement, blog visits.) The score isn’t an end-all, be-all of social but it’s worth paying attention to. So far Klout is the only widespread service for measuring social that has any authority.
5. Repeat Engagers:
Repeat engagers are the holy grail of your brand. These super-fans share your content and reach out to you on social repeatedly, indicating you’re doing something right when it comes to their demographic. These engagers are going to take some handiwork to measure but shouldn’t be ignored. The more you have, the more you know you’re putting out content that’s striking a chord. Aim for more and more over time.
4. Conversions:
Conversions are the best way to measure ROI, the only metric your boss cares about when it comes to social media. Thanks to services like Google Analytics it’s relatively easy to find out how people get to your site, and from there to track whether or not they convert. If your socially-spurred conversions are lower than your other traffic you need to figure out why. Social conversions should be at least as stable as all your other traffic.
3. Share of Voice:
So you’ve got 1,000 Twitter followers. Great! But what if your biggest competitors have 10,000, 14,000, and 30,000, respectively. Your share of voice in social is crucial – you can’t be the only content out there but you want to have the biggest audience within your field. Do some digging into your competitors’ obvious metrics and start comparing your own. Aim to double your share of voice every few months or so.
2. Customer Mentions:
Sure, it’s important how many Facebook fans your business page has but if those people aren’t interacting with you they’re wasted opportunities. Each network provides a way to (sometimes manually) measure mentions which are the most undervalued piece of data in social. It’s not enough to have an audience, you need engagement to be effective.
1. Referral Traffic:
There are hundreds of analyticS systems that can help you measure referrals. Use as many as you can. Finding out how people are landing on your site isn’t just important for social, it’s important for all your marketing channels, but social is one of the most direct ways to refer people available. If you’ve got tons of social connections but your referral numbers don’t compare, you’ve got some work to do to.
Social is fun, it’s exciting, and it’s subjective, but like any good marketing channel it’s crucial to know if your dollars are going down the drain. If you’re going to spend time and resources on a dedicated social marketing plan (and you should), you must have a system for measuring the results.
