Is social media measurable? Maybe – if you know where to look. Instead of measuring hard data like return on social media investment, we use “soft metrics” like reach and frequency to determine the success of our social media campaigns. Here are 5 metrics you can begin to consider as you run your social media analytics.
1. Engagement Frequency
How often are your customers engaging with your brand on social media? Customers who engage more often may be your “brand advocates,” and far higher value than your average follower. Using social listening analytics, you should identify which of your users are most engaged with your brand. Take the top 10% of your users by engagement frequency and their personal social network size and make the brand advocates — send them free swag, give them VIP service, and treat them like the social connectors they are.
2. Traffic From Social
Is social media actually driving more traffic to your site? While not necessarily a metric that contributes directly to whether or not social media is a good investment or not, your ability to drive customers to your site shows increased traction on social networks, combined with increased relevance to users, combined with increased trust in your brand. It’s a combination of factors that eventually results in more Web traffic, but all of these factors are good in their own right.
3. Brand Mentions
Are your influencers and brand advocates talking about your brand? Increasing your number of brand mentions per month is a long-term goal for most businesses. Start conversations daily or weekly with new advocates or influencers and keep them going!
4. Net Followers Per Day
It’s not enough just to track the number of new followers you get daily — certainly, we hope this number goes up. But net followers is a better metric. It takes into account followers you’ve lost. Net followers per day, however, may be the best metric available, as we should be trying to increase our COMPOUNDED monthly growth rate.
5. Organic Reach
Earning organic reach is the holy grail of social media. Organic reach occurs when people engage with your content. Each time someone engages with your content, a small number of their friends will also see it, engage with friends-of-friends, and help your organic reach explode. To achieve “traction” with a social media campaign, such that your organic reach trends up, rather than down, you must optimize the content’s viral coefficient, “V0,” such that V0 < 0 < Network Size * Likelihood of Sharing. If your content’s likelihood of sharing multiplied by the average network size of those who share is too low, the content will simply not have much, if any, organic reach.
If you use these five metrics, you’ll be ready to get the most from your social media campaign. For more information about social media marketing, and how to get started, connect with us!
I'm the Director of Digital Services and Partner at Ballantine, a family-owned and operated direct mail & digital marketing company based in New Jersey. and started in 1966 by my great uncle!
