Social media measurement metrics are metrics that you can use to measure the success of your social media marketing efforts. Everybody knows that knowing, or measuring, is half the battle when it comes to improving, right? To find out which social media marketing efforts work best, and which don’t work at all, you need to review your performance data regularly. Social media marketing measurement tools, like many other SEO tools, help you do just that.
Social media marketing is marketing. You need a strategy and one of the first steps is defining your business objectives. We do not use marketing without reason or manage a company only for the sheer pleasure of it And we do not measure just for the sake of measuring.
Exactly the same applies to social media marketing. It serves business goals. Social media monitoring, for instance, has a purpose: identifying what people say in online conversations about our company, brands, competitors, their needs, trends, etc. The final goal is to use the data we thus acquire in order to improve our marketing efforts and pro-actively respond and engage. Social CRM is bi-directional.
Marketers are increasingly accountable for what they do, they have to create value and need to have a dashboard to improve, guide, and amend the efficiency of their social media marketing activities. Of course, the same applies to other managers in a company.
Volume
The first – and easiest – social media metric to measure is volume. What is the size of the conversation about your brand or your campaign? Volume is a great initial indicator of interest. People tend to talk about things they either love or hate, but they rarely talk about things they simply don’t care about at all.
While volume can seem like a simple counting metric, there’s more to it than just counting tweets and wall posts. It’s important to measure the number of messages about your brand, as well as the number of people talking about your brand, and track how both of those numbers change over time. For example, Facebook Insights has a useful metric (cleverly called “people talking about this”) that measures how many unique people have posted something to their walls about your brand page.
Learn when the volume is higher – are there days or times when more people seem to be talking about your brand? You can use this information to focus more on your own posts during these times to get more engagement, which we’ll talk about in a minute.
Reach
Reach measures the spread of a social media conversation. On its own, the reach can help you understand the context of your content. How far is your content disseminating and how big is the audience for your message? Reach is a measure of potential audience size.
And of course, a large audience is good, but reach alone does not tell you everything. Reach becomes very powerful when compared to other engagement metrics. Use reach as the denominator in your social media measurement equations.
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Pick important action or engagement numbers like clicks, retweets, or replies (more on this in a second) and divide them by reach to calculate an engagement percentage. Of the possible audience for your campaign, how many people participated? Reach helps contextualize other engagement metrics.
Engagement
Speaking of engagement metrics, this is one of the most important areas to measure in social media. How are people participating in the conversation about your brand? What are they doing to spread your content and engage with the topic?
In most social media settings, content can be both shared and replied to. Twitter retweets (RTs) and Facebook shares and posts are helpful to know who is spreading your content, while comments, replies, and likes are helpful to see who is replying to your content. Think carefully about your goals with social media. Are you focused more on generating interaction (replies, comments) or on spreading a message (retweets and posts)? Be sure you’re using metrics that reflect what’s important to your brand right now.
And are there types of content that generate engagement? Start paying attention to what messages generate the most replies and RTs. It might surprise you what people interact with; it’s not always what you expect.
Influence
Who is talking about your brand and what kind of impact do they have? Influence is probably the most controversial social media metric; there are myriad tools that measure social influence, and they all do it in different ways. But one thing they all agree on is that audience size does not necessarily relate to influencing. Just because someone has a lot of friends or followers, that does not mean they can encourage those followers to actually do anything.
Based on past actions, we can make assumptions about how influential someone might be in the future. This type of potential influence is useful to decide who to reach out to when you’re preparing for a campaign. Tools like Klout and PeerIndex assign people an influence score. Tools like these measure online social capital and the (potential) ability to influence others.
Kinetic influence, on the other hand, will help you understand who is participating in and driving the conversation about your brand and your campaigns, and who gets others to participate in these specific conversations. You can find your brand advocates by focusing on people whose messages are amplified by others, and not just who has the most followers.
Share of Voice
Finally, to really understand how well you’re doing on social media, you should consider a share of voice metrics. How does the conversation about your brand compare to conversations about your competitors? Determine what percentage of the overall conversation about your industry is focused on your brand compared to your main competitors. And learn from your competitors’ successes; since so many of these social media conversations are public, you can measure your competitors’ impact just as easily as you can measure your own.
Conversion rate
It represents the total number of users who take the desired action after clicking on a link in your post.
The conversion actions can be defined as the ultimate action you’d like users to take on your site: downloads, registrations, subscriptions, installations, etc.
CTR or Click-Through Rate
CTR takes the number of clicks a post gets and divides it by the number of impressions. A low CTR means you have a high number of impressions and a low number of clicks – and that your content isn’t resonating with the audience.
CPC or Cost per Conversion
When all is said and done, how much did it cost to get that conversion? Take all the costs of the social media campaign and divide it by the number of conversions you got.
If you spend $1,000 and get two conversions, your CPC is $500. If your profit is $300, you have some work to do.
CPM or Cost per Thousand Impression
CPM is the amount you pay every time a thousand people scroll past your sponsored social media post.
Bounce rate
This metric measures the percentage of users who clicked on a link in your social media post, but quickly left the page without taking any action.
Customer reviews/testimonials
These include any positive or negative reviews, comments, assessments, or endorsements your brand received over a specific period.
This is a really important metric to track. If your customers are happy with your product, chances are they will share their positive experiences with others.
Customer satisfaction
As the name itself suggests, this metric tells you how satisfied customers are with a certain product or service.
Conclusion
Measurement is the language of business. Without measurement, you won’t know whether or not you are getting better at something. The ultimate goal of social media marketing is to get more sales, and in order to do that, we must measure the effectiveness of our efforts.