Do Social Media Metrics and Numbers Actually Matter? When I first start working with my social media clients I’m always fascinated to see what they’re doing well and what they could improve on. There’s a pattern developing on what I discover and I’d like to share it here. Image Courtesy of Shutterstock Mistake No 1. No Inbound Marketing They’re often doing a great job of pushing out information but not actively engaging their followers and wondering why they’re not getting any traction. There are often no questions being asked, no sharing of information other than their own, no getting feedback on something they’re doing and no incentives to stick around. Mistake No 2: Inconsistency They’re not being consistent – a Twitter account they posted to back in April 2010, a semi completed LinkedIn profile, a Facebook group that is stagnant or a mild obsession with numbers and status.
You have to be seen on these sites regularly talking to people, being of us and value and engaging otherwise in this instant 24/7 world you’ll be forgotten. 1. 2. 3. 5 Social Media Metrics That Matter Now. As your business gets more social-savvy, strengthen your metrics strategy. Here's how. As businesses get more sophisticated in their use of social networking, so too are the metrics by which they measure social business ROI. Back in the dawn of the social networking age, organizations relied almost solely on simple, standard metrics, such as the number of Facebook fans and likes or the number of Twitter followers and tweets/retweets, to determine their success. Those metrics are still important, but organizations today are developing more sophisticated metrics to measure their progress in meeting increasingly granular social objectives.
That makes it difficult to prescribe the social metrics that matter most, because what matters will differ depending on your organization's size, industry, products, current goals for social, and so on. 1. . [ Which social sites are worth your time and attention? 2. 3. 4. 5. Follow Deb Donston-Miller at @debdonston. More Insights. Measuring Social Media: Four Metrics That Matter. Top five social media metrics that matter. Social media is dominated by vanity metrics that are otherwise worthless to your organization.
Followers, fans and page “likes” are relatively meaningless. Anyone can like your page or follow you on Twitter. Some even pay for them, even though it genuinely defeats the purpose of social media. Your overall influence and broadcast power is seen through retweets, sharing (read: not liking) your posts and organic links. User Engagement Likes and followers are only the skeleton of your gorgeous social media landscape. If your page has 100,000 likes, but nobody is engaging with your content, your efforts are not generating a return. Influence Influence is the anti-metric, but it’s arguably the only metric that matters. Shares and Comments Anyone may like your Facebook post, but only a fraction will comment on and share your content. Referrals and Time on Site Are people clicking on your links and engaging with the content behind your brand messaging?
Inbound Links Rethink the Dashboard. The Four Fundamental Metrics that Matter Most in Social Media. This post was written by seasoned social media manager Kyle Del Bonis to kick off the Argyle Best Practices Series. Get more social insights by following Kyle on twitter @KyleDelBonis and Facebook at /kdelbonis. Measure or Move On “You can’t manage what you don’t measure” — Peter Drucker If you’re only measuring the rise and fall of Followers and Likes, you’re doing social wrong. If you don’t have the time or energy to measure anything else, then you shouldn’t be in social at all – go spend that bandwidth on Tumblr with the other kids.
If, however, you have the good sense to want to know how to do your job and manage your social brand (the right way) then this post is for you. Audience Analysis While you can’t stop at measuring audience size, you can start there (aka: Twitter Followers and Facebook Likes). Interaction Rate = Interactions / Followers Imagine you have 10,000 followers and have received 1,000 interactions in the past month. Click Rate = Clicks / Followers Content Analysis. Which Social Media Metrics Should Nonprofits Keep Track Of? Steven Shattuck is a guest contributor for Nonprofit Hub, and is VP of Marketing at Bloomerang. He is a featured contributor to Social Media Today and has been published in Search Engine Journal, Business2Community and the Content Marketing Institute. _____________ Interpreting and reporting on analytics can be almost as difficult and time consuming as actually planning and deploying the marketing campaigns themselves. To make matters worse, social media campaigns are notoriously hard to track.
Conversions Are King It’s likely that nonprofit marketers have a short list of overarching goals: create advocates, generate donations, enlist volunteers. Google Analytics is a great place to start. First, create your conversion goals in the “Admin section.” Next, add all of your social profiles to your account. Finally, visit the “Social” menu option under “Traffic Sources.” Engagement is Nice, But Focus on Sentiment Engagement metrics are easy to track and report, and often dominant reporting. 1.
Social Media Metrics that Matter Most for Small Business. By: John Rossheim Metrics, metrics -- with so many ways to slice and dice social media metrics (from the basic “number of clicks” to more complex abstractions like “level of engagement”) how can small businesses confirm the effectiveness of their social media? In order to get the maximum return on their social media investment, small companies must move beyond celebrations of vanity-data milestones such as 1,000 fans or 10,000 “likes.” The real challenge is uncovering actionable business insights that will analyze the behavior of buyers and prospects.
Here's how to get started. Clicks per social media platform. Engagement. “Eighty percent of small-business social media activity ought to be about building relationships,” says Paul Rand, author of Highly Recommended: Harnessing the Power of Word of Mouth and Social Media to Build Your Brand and Your Business. Virality. Google Analytics. Conversions. How you qualify “conversions” is up to you. Offline mentions. Cost of customer acquisition. The Most Overrated Social Media Metric. 4 Social Media Metrics That Matter! Measuring Social Media is debatable. The ‘ROI Factor’ is still being discussed by many Social Media veterans and experts alike.Although many believe that Social Media is not measurable (and should not be attached to a dollar value, I believe that any marketing strategy executed should be measured.
The measurement might not be in terms of a currency, but might well be in terms of other tangible factors. As people start talking about you or your Brand online,there is a need for you to start tracking it and make meaning out of the ‘Big Data’ hype. While there are many Tools in the market to track these conversations around your Earned and Owned conversations,there are too many metrics to go through while reviewing your performance.
Here we will simplify the process to list down the 4 Social Media Metric Categories you can keep a track of for your Brand’s performance. Social Media Reach: Metrics to Consider: Engagement: Social Customer Outreach: Impact to the Brand: Visit to your website: Revenue: Social Media Metrics That Matter. We’ve gone past convincing ourselves that digital marketing is the most efficient marketing tool available. Today, this no longer is a theory but a well-known fact. In the past few years, we’ve seen how brands leveraged on the benefits of social media marketing both to increase awareness and sales. Social Media has also been instrumental in extending the reach of customer support, giving people and brands a chance to connect and engage at a level that never was achieved before.
Today, as technology and online trends develop at an increasingly exciting speed, social media marketing is pushed to be even more efficient and effective. Counting likes and gathering followers are no longer enough to measure its effectiveness. Here’s a list of social media metrics you should be looking at: Comments – Being present in social media, means being social and this is one measure of people embracing your presence in their own social circle. Being present in social media requires you to be social. Which Social Media Marketing Metrics Really Matter? (And To Whom?) We’ve been pretty vocal over the past couple of years about how marketers should define success in social media and (perhaps more importantly) how they shouldn’t define success.
To put it bluntly, if you’re focusing on fans and followers, then you’re almost certainly doing it wrong. But saying that raises the question: If the number of fans or followers you have doesn’t tell us whether you’ve succeeded as a company, then what does it tell you? And if your CEO shouldn’t be worried about the number of wall posts you’ve generated, then who should be paying attention to this number? Since last summer, I’ve been using a structured model to help my clients focus on delivering the right social media marketing data to various stakeholders inside their organization.
Social media programs throw off so much data that the key to measuring and managing your programs well is focusing each stakeholder on just the pieces of data that are relevant to helping them do their jobs. Why Social Media ROI Can’t Be Measured – And Why That’s OK. “There are things we know that we know. There are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we do not know we don’t know.”
When I read this (slightly paraphrased) quote from Donald Rumsfeld back when it was first said in 2002, it sounded like total political gobbledygook.But I thought of it recently in a new context: social media ROI. “Dark social” eclipses everything we thought we knew about social media ROI. What’s The True Value Of Social Media? Everyone else can keep fretting, but I’ve gotten to a zen place when it comes to social media ROI. It’s a shot to get on someone’s radar and let that person know you’re cool, smart, funny, interesting and valuable to have around. That’s the value of social media – the potential to create a new relationship where there wasn’t one before. Will this warm and fuzzy analogy get you to the bottom line number we’re all looking for?
Knowing What We Can Know Awareness Reach Traffic Engagement Intelligence. The 5 Social Media Metrics Your CEO Actually Cares About. This is Brian, our CEO. Aside from his outstanding taste in headwear, Brian is also known around HubSpot for his unwavering vision of what it will take to build HubSpot into a once-in-a-generation company. He's also a data guy. An MIT alum and lecturer, Brian knows how to separate useful data from vanity metrics, and he's quick to let you know what truly counts as an indicator of how our company is faring at delivering on its promise.
While we proudly think of Brian as a unique leader, this laser focus on measuring the right metrics is something I'd wager he shares with CEOs across the board. 1) Channel Reports: Are we spending our time and money in the right places? It never feels like you can move fast enough when you're trying to build something remarkable. If you're a HubSpot customer, you can find this data in the Sources report (example below), and you can export it to send to your CEO along with the rest of the data that matters for social media decision-making.
The 4 Types of Content Metrics That Matter. Social Media Insights. New Social Media Metrics. Measuring What Matters in Social Media. November 18, 2013 By: Tania Yuki We are wired to love BIG and to believe that bigger is better. But in the case of measuring social media, our fixation with BIG can sometimes drive us to misleading results. Just focusing on the number of fans or followers may not be the best indicator of the real value of a brand’s social community. There are many reasons that brands should embark on a social strategy, whether it’s to create buzz and brand awareness, generate leads, increase customer loyalty, drive website traffic, or even move the needle on sales. But whatever your ultimate goals, there are three building blocks that can help drive social marketing success that have little to do with BIG. Building Block 1: Growth and Engagement Metrics Growth paired with engagement metrics allow you to understand the effectiveness and efficiency of your social media efforts by measuring audience size and engagement over time.
Building Block 2: Content Strategy Metrics.