Digital Marketing, Social Media Marketing

How to Measure Social Media

Every business starting with social media quickly turns to the question of measurement. Measurement is as key for social media as it is for any other digital marketing tool. Being able to measure social media performance also means being able to improve it.

There are many different KPIs that can be tracked for social media specifically, but it is important to note that measuring and assessing metrics throughout your digital marketing presence is necessary in order to gain a full picture. It further unlocks the maximum value of your digital programs – social media being one of them.

The range of KPIs you can measure absolutely depends on the mix of social media channels you use, just as much as the level of integration of all digital marketing elements with each other.

Generally, we categorize three main categories for measuring digital KPIs:

  • Owned channels or social media presence: These are the metrics and the data relating to the channels that are part of your active social media portfolio, like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, or Pinterest, to just name a few. Should you have a corporate blog, and use platforms like Tumblr or WordPress for it, they also belong to this group.
  • Conversation that happens on channels that you do not own (non-owned social media): Monitoring and measuring the quantity and quality of conversation about your company, brand(s), or product(s) for specific or multiple channels.
  • Web properties: Metric changes for your websites, landing, or campaign pages as they relate to your social media engagement.

 

Owned Social Media

Audience engagement is the best thing that can happen in social media. An audience that talks about you, shares your posts, and likes or comments your posts is engaged with your brand, which may increase your brand’s reputation, loyalty, and recommendations, which in turn can lead to brand evangelism by your customers.

A series of KPIs helps you measure the level of engagement, such as:

Facebook
  • Number of page likes
  • Change in the amount of likes (increase / decrease)
  • Number of active users / visitors to your page
  • Number of post engagements
    • Likes
    • Shares
    • Comments
    • Views
  • Organic reach achieved with own posts (combination of on page views and views of shares)

Facebook’s metrics tools will provide a pretty good breakdown of all of those numbers either for the page as a whole or for individual posts.

Twitter
  • Number of followers
  • Reach of your network (your followers + their followers)
  • Number of post engagements
    • Likes
    • Re-tweets
    • Shares
    • Comments
    • Quotes
    • Views
  • Number of brand engagements
    • @-messages
    • Mentions
Instagram
  • Number of followers
  • Number of post engagements
    • Likes
    • Shares
    • Comments
    • Quotes
    • Views
  • Number of video views and minutes watched
General Analytics
  • Sentiment analysis to filter the tone of the conversation around your brand (good, bad, indifferent)
  • Number of posts by your brand

 

Non-Owned Social Media Engagement

When analyzing the social media engagement across the various channels – own or others – the data needs to be dependable. That means cleaning it of spam and any other noise that may manipulate the numbers. However, it should include all the breakdowns of the nature of the conversations across all channels – your own and others.

As such, the KPIs for non-owned social media engagement should include

  • Change in quantity and quality of social media engagement for product and / or brand across the channels.
  • Change in sentiment within the engagement and conversations when product or brand is the subject of the conversation.

 

Websites, Landing, and Campaign Pages

The influence and power of social media to drive traffic to your digital properties is well-documented at this point. It can further help people with interests relevant to your brand and company discover your online presence with the potential of turning them into customers. For this, it is important that your social media efforts are deeply integrated with your overall digital marketing strategy. All channels have to be interconnected, and websites have to be optimized.

As such, it is suggested to compare visitors entering your websites coming from social media vs. other sources (i.e. online search platforms).

KPI suggestions are:
  • Change in traffic caused by social media channeling people to your websites.
  • Reduction of bounce rate due to more qualified visitors on your page that have a lower propensity to exit the website shortly after it loads.
  • Change in conversion rate, because the visitors drawn to a website via social media are more likely to take action on your page, be it sign-ups or purchases and like.
  • Increase of page views and engagement, powered by the higher activity level of visitors entering sites coming from social media. More activity means more page views and higher likeliness to leave comments, ratings, and feedback.
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About Maurice

Maurice Hofmann is a serial entrepreneur, marketing and digital marketing specialist, who is known for his innovative drive as well as his ability to lead cross functional teams to achieve the highest level of success. In his 20 year spanning career, he has experienced all aspects of marketing, working in various global roles spreading across TV production, Army ‘Psychological Operations, as an owner of a Brand Experience agency or as a leader of marketing departments for several software companies, start-ups and as a M

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