I read an interesting article by Nick O'Neill (http://bit.ly/99grIY) in which he suggested his top 10 Social Media monitoring metrics. Measuring is the hardest element to a social media campaign. His thoughts echo my post regarding ROI and the difference between Return on Investment and Risk of Ignorance.
Social Media Monitoring is a new tool and skill, and it is debated whether there will ever be a set of best practice guidelines. The beauty of social media is that it is different for each person, business and brand.
The way people interact, share and use information and engage with each other will be subjective to each case. This gives businesses more freedom and opportunity than ever to create, connect, adapt and innovate.
Social media results are going to be varied for each business, but all must look to garner the view and opinion of their target market.
But in all cases the user or customer is at the center and thus must be monitored.
Not in a 'Big Brother' way, more a Caring, Parental style!
Social Media Leads
This is an obvious one but absolutely critical. Tracking web traffic breakdowns is crucial in using the most effective social media channels - if there is no traffic coming from your Facebook page, is there any point of having one?
There seems to be a common myth that if you utilize every social media outlet, you will garner results - this is wrong. Track your traffic, see what your most popular social channels are and then utilize them effectively.
Activity Ratio
How active is your businesses social network? How many people are actively engaging with your brand? Clearly you want to gain the attention of as many people as possible, but it is common myth that the more followers or members you have, the more successful you will be.
Social media success is governed by the creation of content and services that meets the needs of your network.
Conversions
Linked with the Activity Ratio, Conversion is concerned with how your social members or followers convert into sales,subscriptions or application use. This is a method of measuring Return on Investment on a social media campaign as this allows the linkage of user engagement against tangible results.
High conversion rates will ultimately show that your content is good and investment was worthwhile, with low conversion rate suggesting that there is an underlying problem with content and thus user engagement.
Loyalty
Are your social members interacting with you repeatedly or are they just using your service only once, never to return?! How many of your members are re-sharing, referring or talking about your content and service?
Although this is a particularly hard metric to follow, many of the new social media analytic packages e.g. Viral Heat, do offer this sort of tangible analysis.
Brand Mentions
Potentially the most important metric for a business to follow on social media. As I referred to in a post last week, consumers will be talking about your brand, whether you follow and track their views is up to you. But if you don't, you have no control or influence on their positive or negative views.
Many of the new social media analytics packages offer a Sentiment analysis feature, that is crucial in monitoring and adapting to consumer feeling in social networks.
Customers hold the power to irreversibly damage your brand through negative comments and information that will spread like wildfire through social networks unless managed by your brand.