Social Media Metrics 101: The Basics of Social Analytics

A Social Media Marketing campaign without metrics is like a shoe without laces; a geek without braces; asentencewithoutspaces.

Without social media metrics, it is impossible to know how effective you are being, to know what you are doing wrong and what you are doing right. Luckily, using social media metrics isn’t as hard as it sounds, even if it conjures up images of that statistics course you hated so much in college. To begin a social media metrics campaign you simply need to follow the steps below:

1. Measuring your Social Activity & Buzz
   This step involves measuring the ripples that your social media activity is making by measuring a few key elements:

• Facebook Likes
• Twitter Retweets
• Follows (across various social networks)
• Social Mentions (across various social networks)
• Shares (across various social networks)
• Sentiment (across various social networks)
• Comments (across various social networks)

If you use your social media measurement application to measure the above you have already got the basic, and most important moves down for measuring your social media impact. If the results turn out less than favourable then you may want to go back to basics (in which case check out our Social Media Marketing FAQ) or find some helpful tips and tricks to improve your marketing strategy.

2. Effects on your Business
The point of social media marketing campaigns is to eventually have a visible effect on your business, so the next step is to monitor how effectual your social activity and buzz is having on your bottom line. The general areas people look for improvement in are by:

• New clients
• Increased sales
• Improved loyalty metrics
• Improved customer satisfaction rates
• Increased operational efficiency
• More online orders
• Increased traffic to physical stores or locations
• Marketing R.O.I.

This category is always the most difficult thing to measure, especially if you have online campaigns running congruently with offline marketing efforts. If you measure the increases in the above elements via your CRM tool and compare this with your social media analytic outcomes during specific social media campaigns you should see a direct correlation. You should especially be doing this if you are running special social events like a Facebook Contest or other targeted social media campaign.

3. Measuring Tangible Analytics
Measuring the effects on your business as discussed above can be tough, but there are tangible social media analytics that can help you discover how well your social media efforts are translating into real-world benefits. There are 4 main elements you can use to tangibly measure your online success:

• Unique new visitors
• Impressions
• Cost Per Impression (CPI)
• Bounce Rate

If you measure the above 4 elements and compare them to your social media efforts the correlation will help you fine tune your marketing strategies.

4. Turns Measurements into Results
The first steps to social analytics are to find out how to measure how successful your social media marketing campaigns are. The next step is to turn those outcomes into a goal-oriented tactical plan. To do this you simply need to interpret your social media metrics into a behavioural analysis plan: if one social activity you did, say a Facebook Contest translated into 145 impressions, 75 unique new visitors, 21 sales but only 2 new clients then you know that a contest drives further integration into your existing social media community. If your next goal is to attract new customers then you may want to try a sweepstakes-style event as they usually drive activity and buzz with people who aren’t your clients or followers yet. 

If you follow the 4 social media metric principals above then you will be able to not only measure the effectiveness and success of your social media marketing campaigns but also give you the tools you need to improve upon them and create other new, more targeted, campaigns through behavioural analysis.

Robin Wilding (90 Posts)

Robin Wilding is a professionally trained Canadian journalist striving to bring journalistic-era intergity to online media. She has a second degree in Political Science--with a focus on International Relations and the developing world. Currently Robin is a contributor to several technology publications, including Brajeshwar.com, SocialTechnologyReview.com, HostingIndustryWatch.com, AnimationCareerReview.com and CompareBusinessProducts.com. She also works for several web developers; and does ghost writing for several high level executives within the technology sector. Robin's work is showcased in her portfolio: http://shownd.com/robinwilding