6 Social Media Measurements

Social media is now an important player in the business world. From customer service to human resource to marketing and product development, social media tools’ impact is undeniable. But, are your social media engagement efforts really successful? How do we measure the success of your social media efforts?

If you are planning to run specific programs, promotions and initiatives that require intensive efforts, money, resources, and time, you need to know what would be working for your plan and what is best for your plan. Ask yourself if social media can be a useful tool in your business plan and look at ways on how it can aid your business. If social media can be used in your business, don’t under-estimate its power. The web is a huge, interconnected forum.  Social, search, and mail are intricately weaved together in such a way that they can significantly affect each other.

Once you have engaged yourself in social media, you’ll need some benchmarks to measure your success against. Here are 6 buckets of social media measurement that can be helpful to your bottom line.

Awareness

Of course, when you are going to put up a website or post your products online, awareness is of utmost importance. How can you sell your products online successfully if no one sees them? You will know the level of your social media awareness by looking at the amount of website traffic or site visits or page views you acquired, the number of searches for brand terms, and the video and content views. Once they are all high, you know that you are on the right track. But if the figures are disheartening, find more ways to increase awareness of your presence.

Popularity

Popularity comes with awareness. When people are aware of your online presence, they will visit you and hopefully become a loyal visitor or follower. Popularity is simply measured on the number of people that subscribe to your business’ social media channels. Many argue that it’s more about the quality and over quantity. While this may be true to some extent, having many followers or subscribers is still a lot better. Yes, having 500 followers on Twitter that are all professional and influential people or companies is a good thing, but having 20,000 followers of “consumers” will most likely do a lot more for your marketing goals. You can measure your popularity by looking at the number of email subscribers, Twitter followers, number of Linkedln group members, and the number of likes of your Facebook page.

Engagement

Social media success is not just based on the number of page visits, followers or likes. It is also based on the interaction. Between the website, page or account and the viewer or follower, interaction is important.  How they interact with your content is an essential tool in acquiring user feedback, their wants and needs, and what they dislike about your content. So to measure your engagement level, look at the number of “Likes” on your official Facebook page, shares for your website, and product mention in forums and comment sections whether positive, negative or neutral. Other areas to check out would be blog comments, ratings, retweets, and email opens, clicks, complaints, and unsubscribes.

Influence

If you are successful in social media, then you would be influential. Remember the power of a simple tweet. For example, when Lady Gaga tweeted about Maria Aragon’s video on YouTube, the video’s views skyrocketed to more than 3 Million views in just a couple of hours. Check the number and quality of inbound links to your content, likelihood that emails drive actions, likelihood that Twitter links are retweeted or commented on, the likelihood that your Facebook posts will be liked and commented on, and the likelihood that content will be shared/liked and to what extent. These will all give you indications of your influence.

Share of Voice and Sentiment

Measuring the share of voice and sentiment for your company and products can be extremely revealing and helpful in understanding how the market perceives you.  Share of voice and sentiment is simply the number of times people mention you, your brand, or blog in online conversations.  This can be via forums, websites, blogs, commments, and of course, social media. In social media, this is extremely important as this will give a hint to your online status. In order to do this, you need to have a monitoring program that will keep track of all conversations where you are mentioned. You need to check if you are mentioned in a positive, negative, or neutral way. Once you have it tracked, you need to calculate your average sentiment. The share of voice is calculated by dividing the number of conversations about your brand by the total number of conversations about brands in your market. For a more detailed discussion, visit Jay Baer’s Beginner’s Guide to Share of Voice.  At the end of the day, knowing your share of voice and sentiment will lead to smarter marketing decisions.

Business Metrics

You can use tools that will track your social media status for you – tools that will check your leads, email subscribers (old and new), sales and donations, such as Argyle Social. With these tools, you can create campaigns and see which links or posts are driving more attention in the social media world. You can ultimately keep track of anything you wanted to keep track related to your social media activities.