In an evolving business landscape, the importance of measuring your social media success as efficiently as possible is nonnegotiable. With the tons of reporting tools and data available/easily accessible; choosing the right type of metric to monitor can be a heck of a task for social media marketers like myself.
As a social media manager having to handle brands, it is therefore important to constantly monitor your brands performance across platforms in order to optimize your content and enhance your share of voice. Based on my experience in the industry, I have put together the following 3o social media metrics- categorized into nine groups as they have proven to be key to analyzing your social media for optimum success.
AUDIENCE METRICS
- Audience Growth: The rate at which your brand increases (or loses) in audience.
- Engagement as % of Audience: Adding up total engagement actions across all your social networks and then dividing that by total audience.
- Engagement per Fan/Follower: Adding up total engagement actions for one network and dividing by the number of fans (or followers) for that particular network.
- Engagement per reach: Adding up total engagement actions for one network and dividing by the total reach for that particular network.
SOCIAL LISTENING & MONITORING
- Sentiment Analysis: Detecting and understanding how the audience is reacting to a brand, either positively or negatively.
- Presence: The complete collection of your brand’s presence across all the social networks.
- Reach: The total combined amount of your brand’s audience, compounded by the friends of the audience and anyone in the greater community who is talking about or engaging with your brand.
ENGAGEMENT METRICS
- Facebook Engagement: Combination of all the activity on your brand’s Fan Page: shares, PTAT, comments, clicks and likes.
- Twitter Engagement: Combination of all the activity on your brand’s Twitter account: Retweets, mentions, replies and clicks.
- Google+ Engagement: Combination of all the activity on your brand’s Google+ page: Shares, comments, and +1s.
- YouTube Engagement: Combination of all the activity on your brand’s YouTube channel: comments, ratings, and shares.
- Click Through Rate: The number of clicks on a post divided by the number of impressions for the post.
- Engagement Rate: Engagement activities on a particular social channel divided by the associated audience. This can be looked at holistically for an entire presence, for a specific channel, or for a specific post or activity type.
- Engagement Decay: The progressive decrease over time in engagement rate for a piece of content or collection of content.
- Keyword Frequency: The number of times that a particular keyword or phrase is found within your social graph.
CONTENT PERFORMANCE
Tracking and analysing the success (or failure) of a piece of content. Understanding what causes certain content to succeed and others to fail will give your brand better insight into where they should devote time and resources to reach your goals.
16. Interactions: The way in which a brand responds to and builds relationships with their social audience.
TOTAL EXPOSURE METRICS & SOCIAL GRAPH
Total exposure is the size of your brand’s primary audience combined with the greater community that your brand has the potential to reach and engage. The social graph is the interconnected relationship between your brand, the audience, and the greater community. Understanding both these elements, will help your brand realize its social media potential and puts context around where they fit in the greater social community. The related metrics include:
17. Amplification: The way in which, through audience engagement, a piece of content reaches the secondary and tertiary (and on) levels of a brand’s social presence. This can vary by channel, Retweets on Twitter, Shares on Facebook, Shares on Google+, but the goal is the same.
18. Post Reach: The estimated number of individuals who see a piece of outbound content at least once, during a specific period of time.
19. Potential Reach: The total potential number of individuals in a brand’s audience that could have the opportunity to see a piece content, during a specific period of time.
20. Potential Impressions: The number of times a piece of content could be displayed, regardless of whether or not it is interacted with, during a specific time period.
CUSTOMER SERVICE
21. Response Time: How quickly your brand responds to engagement activities and inquiries from your audience.
22. Response Rate: The percentage of audience inquiries responded to within a certain amount of time.
DEMOGRAPHICS
23. Klout Score / Influencers: Klout is a mechanism for measuring how influential a person or brand is on a particular social channel. It provides brands with a way of identifying existing influencers in their audience as well as identifying new ones.
24. Geographic Distribution: Where in the world the audience is physically located.
25. Topical Influencer: Who the influencers are- on a particular subject.
COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS
Competitive analysis and benchmarking allows your brand to monitor and measure the effectiveness of your campaigns against the competition. This type of analysis provides valuable insights and gives context to how your brand’s metrics relate to others in its specific market, or the greater social community.
26. Share of Voice: How big your brand’s slice of the conversation is compared to your competition?
27. Share of Engagement: How does your brand’s engagement metrics compare to your competition?
28. Share of Audience: How does your brand’s audience compare to your competition?
OTHERS
29. Attribution: Tracking and understanding what campaigns on which channels are responsible for a brand’s social media successes and failures.
30. Virality: The rate at which your brand’s content spreads across the social graph. In some instances the success of a piece of content is tied how viral it becomes (sometimes involving your hashtags).
Metrics that really do not have an impact to the bottom line is a waste of time and resources if you continue as you have always measured and it will show your boss or organisation how incompetent you are when it comes to proper reporting. Now that you have gained insights into the key social media metrics that matters, you can be confident to analyse your social media community/channels like a PRO.
so go make me proud!
