Now that you are confident that you meet the two basic criteria for measuring your social media efforts, here are some more tactical ways you can start measuring success in the social space. Do I think these are great? No…not really. Much like the way we used to think “impressions” were a good indicator of display/banner marketing success, these indicators are a first, best guess at how we might measure what works and what doesn’t. We’ll get more sophisticated over time, but for now it’s a start.
As you go through this list, keep one thing in the back of your mind: we are trying to measure engagement. In other words, how much is your audience engaged with, participating in and sharing the conversation about your products and services, and what is the general tone/sentiment of the conversation(s). Also, note that engagement can vary depending on who is leading the conversation. Be mindful of where these conversations are starting, who is leading them and why. Engagement is the key metric here.
- Fans and Followers: this is the easy one. If you have a Facebook page for your business, you should be getting Fans. If you are Tweeting, you should be building up followers. These are simple to measure, but a very superficial indicator of engagement. You need to go deeper. Building a social base is not an exercise in collecting. You need to be relevant and valuable to create real success.
- Facebook “Likes”: once you have a Facebook Page for your business, you’ll want to generate awareness about the page. One of the best ways to do this is to get other FB-ers to “like” your page. When they do, it shows up on their wall and is seen by everyone in their social graph (potentially).
- Facebook “Shares”: by creating compelling content or offers, a fan is more likely to share your information with others. This can happen on the Facebook platform, or via Facebook Connect widgets that you can install on your site (see my “Share” button, above). As with a “Like,” when they “Share” it appears in their News Feed.
- Offer Response: you can create offers in both Facebook and Twitter. As a matter of fact, some data indicates that your Fans and Followers are engaged with you specifically because they expect some kind of reward. Measure response to your offer postings using traditional methods, i.e. click-throughs, landing page views, etc.
- Retweets: If you are creating great Tweets, your Followers will “retweet” your message and expose it to their followers, helping your message spread virally. This is a great indicator of both engagement and relevancy. Measuring how often a tweet is retweeted is pretty easy using some of the free social media dashboards, like Hootsuite and Tweetdeck.
- Wall Posts: if you maintain an open wall on Facebook, see how many people are participating on it through the “comments” they leave on a wall post. A great way to encourage engagement is to ask a question of your fans, and see what happens. I think REI does a pretty good job at this. For what not to do, read the Nestle case study. Ouch.
So, pretty basic stuff…for now. There is a lot more to dig into here, specifically with regards to sentiment measurement, sentiment conversion, depth of engagement, measurement of the evangelist : detractor ratio, etc. Any of these warrants a series of posts in and of themselves. But start with the above, see what stories they tell and test some engagement concepts. This is fun stuff, so be playful, have fun. Your customers will notice.
[...] However, consider the following before you leap into the social media metrics suggestions I make in Part Two [...]