What Social Media Metrics Should You Track?

The idea of using social media metrics and marketing automation is still a far fetched idea for most businesses, which means those who are taking advantage of it right now have a serious leg up on the competition.

But this isn’t about robots taking over your social media and marketing jobs. Marketing is one part strategy and one part using the right tools in the right way that help a business or individual to work smarter and reach a target audience. In terms of a definitive explanation of marketing automation, Media Consultant Paul Conley may have hit the nail on the head when he said "don’t accept anyone else’s definition of marketing automation." It’s still a changing concept.

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Mark Evans, Director of Communications at Sysomos defines social media automation as "a technique in which technology handles some of the blocking and tackling within social media as opposed to having a person manually do it."

This increases efficiency by automating tasks that would have taken much longer and been more costly if done manually by an employee, however Evans warns that there is a risk of relying on this too much because part of what makes a company’s social media efforts successful is real engagement. Here’s where strategy comes in.

Ron Domingue, Interactive Strategist at Naked Pizza, a social media superstar among pizza companies, says that tracking metrics has been key to the company’s success. The company does not use any traditional methods of advertising and relies solely on social media, particularly videos on Youtube and Vimeo.

"We’ve been producing a lot of videos lately and are paying close attention to which videos are doing the best, which are being shared and which are being watched all the way through. By seeing which videos are of most interest, we are really getting a better idea of who our customers are and what they like. This helps us to strategize on the best methods of engagement going forward."

So what should you be tracking? Well that depends primarily on your goals. Maybe your goal is to increase sales, maybe it’s to improve customer service and maybe you just want to increase brand awareness. You can track a combination of specific metrics based on what information you need to measure against goals.

A few examples of metrics you may want to be tracking:

Note: Many of the following metrics are common tracked using free tools such as Google Analytics, or social media monitoring technology promoted by companies such as Radian6. Call Center IQ will feature a follow up article discussing these tracking and monitoring options in early May.

Brand mentions: How often your brand is being mentioned (positively and negatively) in social media and how often you are able to take a negative comment or complaint and turn it around based on your online interaction.

Engagement duration: How long a person is spending on your page, reading blogs, watching videos, etc. Which pages and content are the most popular?

Network increases: The growth of your Facebook fans, Twitter followers, blog followers, etc.

Viral content: Which of your blogs, posts or videos are being shared the most across networks? How many friends of friends are sharing your content?

Bounce rate: Your bounce rate is essentially how often people come to your site and then immediately click away, or, "bounce."

Lynn Casper, social media strategist at Working Films and frequent creator of new microsites, noticed that the bounce rate on one of her sites was extremely high.

"I knew people were coming to the site intentionally but then immediately leaving," she said. "I thought maybe they weren’t finding what they wanted when they got here and started thinking of ways to make the site easier to navigate. I added and recategorized the main categories and noticed that people started staying a little longer."

Casper thought she could do even better, so she started tracking how people were consuming the content and realized that they would select one article of interest, read it, then bounce. So she created a "related content" section at the bottom that suggested relevant articles to what was just read and noticed a dramatic spike in the overall engagement duration of the site.

It’s really all about observing and listening to the market in order to understand and then interact with your customer.

"Before you have an exchange with someone, it is helpful to know a bit about them. Monitoring, exclusively, will not give you the insights you need to better know your customer base or community," explained Lauren Vargas, director of community at Radian6.

In a recent video produced by social media marketing automation company Whatsnexx, a marketer’s ideal dream was defined as "being able to reach a customer at the right moment with the right message using the right channel."

Customer expectations have changed, and the way that businesses interact with them online is continuing to evolve. We no longer broadcast messages we think our customers will react to. Now we have the tools to listen to what they are interested in, observe their behaviors and formulate a plan to target them much more effectively based on the story their data has told.