Social Media Marketing Metrics – What to Measure and What to Do With Those Measurements

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Social Media Marketing Metrics –
What to Measure and What to Do With
Those Measurements
Home } Social Media } Social Media Marketing Metrics – What to
Measure and What to Do With Those Measurements
There is a maxim that ‘you can only manage what you can
measure’. This is extremely important for efficient
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planning of your social media marketing strategy. Like
any other form of marketing, your budget will be limited
and you will need to make sure that you are spending it
where it will be most effective.
So how do you measure the effectiveness of your efforts?
Marketing sits on the border between art and science, and
the same can be said of the methods used to interpret
the feedback from your campaign.
Acquiring data from your social sites is not a problem. A
wide range of tools exists to tell you everything that you
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could possibly want to know. The data available begins
with the number of views of your site and becomes more
detailed from there. Because it is so simple to produce
this raw data, it is easy to find yourself completely
overwhelmed in a barrage of statistics. Unfortunately
many of these statistics will not help you see the big
picture-and therefore this will be of no assistance at all in
directing your marketing dollars.
There are many free tools available to measure social
activity, but for better functionality you may need to pay
for upgrades. Here are some ideas to help you decide
what information you will need to gather.
Is there anybody out there?
The best social media marketing campaign in the world is
of no use if no-one is listening. Therefore your first metric
should be the one that measures who has seen your
postings, photos and tweets. This information includes
the number of visitors, their demographic information and
what they actually looked at. Remember to extract the
number of unique visitors, and also ideally you will want
some way of separating the crawlers and robots from the
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real people.
Where did they come from?
The next question is ‘how did they find you?’ Did your
Facebook posting pull them to your website? Did a
particular tweet or series of tweets cause a spike in
traffic?Was there a particular part of your publicity
campaign that really caught people’s attention?
You can see the path that your site visitors have taken if
they have been attracted by an online mention, such as a
news item or blog post. For offline publicity (such as a
mention in a magazine or on a TV show), it is worth using
a specific link in the publicity for the event. This will give
you a real measure of how useful this offline publicity is
to you.
What are they doing?
Getting people to visit your site is only the first step – it
is no good if they take a quick look and then move on.
You need to see how long their visit lasts, what sections
of the site they look at and how many of them comment,
post or retweet. For video sites, you can find out whether

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they watched the entire video or clicked away after ten
seconds. If the latter, you obviously have some work to
do!
What are they saying?
Comments from customers are invaluable for tracking the
health of your brand, and of course for finding out what
people really want from you. There are now sophisticated
tools available to produce quantitative measurements
from comments.
The number of comments made is a first step – when
people take the time to engage with you and start typing,
you know that you have attracted their interest.
Comparing this with the number of visitors will tell you
how well you are retaining the attention of those who
come across your brand. Comment length is also
important, showing that people are really thinking about
you. Possibly the most important parameter is the tone of
the comments – positive versus negative.
Are they telling anybody else?
This is the lifeblood of using social media – the electronic

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‘word of mouth’. You want your customers to do the
online equivalent of shouting ‘hey guys, look at this!’ This
means liking and sharing on Facebook, retweeting or
mentioning on Twitter, and re-pinning photos on
Pinterest. You also hope for links to your blog.
While simple actions such as likes or follows are good,
your metrics need to differentiate between these and the
more engaged users who are mentioning you in postings
and blogs.
Are they the right people?
This refers to the nebulous parameter known as influence,
and the black art of identifying those people with the
most influence on others. Social media marketing
analysts such as Technorati work hard to identify the
influencers in many spheres, and when there are hot
topics on Twitter they run analyses to identify who is
influencing what is happening. The results can be
unexpected – for example, while celebrities may be
influential for clothing sales or music downloads, they are
not always as important as they might like to think in
other areas. This kind of information is very relevant for

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choosing sponsors or attracting traffic by hosting
webchats.
Having decided on the general metrics that you need, you
can then tailor them for the social sites where you have a
presence. For example, on Twitter you will be measuring
your followers, the mentions of your brand, the replies
that you receive and the retweets as people tell others
what they have seen. Clever selection of hashtags also
allows you to track the visibility of your brand elsewhere.
You can also see if people are adding you to their lists.
There is a plethora of Twitter tools available, both as part
of the site and as stand-alones.
For Facebook, you are looking for detail beyond a simple
‘like’. The Facebook Insights facility kicks in once you
have thirty likes on your page, and provides a wealth of
information. Activity is broken down by time, which is
useful if there has been a newsworthy event concerning
your brand. You can see how many users saw your posts,
how many took an action as a result of it and whether
any sponsored stories are producing additional value.
Finally, remember that you need to keep in touch with the

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overall picture. It is very easy to get bogged down in the
detail when studying analysis metrics, and to see things
that are not there. Make sure that your metrics are
working for you – not the other way around.
By Brian Attwood
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