Social media can be an incredibly important tool for your business. But it can also be overwhelming. You’re following what’s being said about your industry and brand, your team is trying to produce and share great content, you’re interacting with customers, finding prospects and you’re trying to make sense of it all. The biggest question you’re most likely trying to answer is if your work in social is helping you achieve real business results. To find out, you need to measure your efforts by tracking the right social media metrics.
So which social media metrics should you be tracking. As a novice beginner, these are the eight key social media metrics you should be tracking:
- Influence
- Audience Growth Rate
- Share of Voice
- Engagement
- Reach
- Exposure
- Sentiment
- Mentions
Influence
Influence measures the extent to which one’s activity in social inspires action in others. Someone with high influence sees a large amount of engagement and amplification of their social messages, proving their audience is actively engaged and likely to listen to their opinions and recommendations. Due to these consistently high levels of interactions, social influencers are viewed as credible sources of information.
How to Measure Influence:
Tools like Klout, PeerIndex and Kred measure influence by assigning a score to one’s social media activity and interactions. Each company uses its own methodology for determining influence by giving different weight to metrics like reach, comments, likes etc. to formulate a number that represents one’s overall social influence.
You can also determine influence on your own, without using a scoring system. When doing so, it’s important to keep in mind that audience size does not necessarily translate to influence. Just because a person has a large social following doesn’t mean they’re influencing their followers. Influence is all about encouraging or inspiring people to take action. That’s why the metrics that are most telling of influence are engagement and amplification.
Here are some key indicators of influence:
- Twitter replies, retweets and list memberships (these are especially helpful in finding influential people in very specific topic areas).
- Google+ comments, shares and +1s.
- Facebook likes, shares and comments.
- LinkedIn recommendations, interactions, likes and comments.
- Pinterest repins, likes and comments.
How to Use Influence:
- Evaluate your social presence. Research the extent to which your messages and content are being shared and use the intel to inform your ongoing strategy.
- Understand who is talking about your brand or company and what kind of impact they have. Reach out and engage with influencers who are portraying you in both a positive and negative light.
- Find the right influencers to help promote your content, campaign or company.
- Make sure you’re researching those who are influential in the space or industry you operate in. A recommendation or endorsement from a trusted social influencer with expertise in your industry can be extremely valuable.
- Evaluate the effectiveness of influencer partnerships by measuring if your reach, exposure and engagement levels increase.
Audience Growth Rate
Audience Growth Rate measures the change in a brand or company’s following on social media networks. Tracking your Audience Growth Rate on each individual network will determine the average rate of increase or decrease in your fans or followers over time.
How to Measure Audience Growth Rate:
Benchmark your audience on each social network and measure the increase in those numbers every day, week, month or for another specific time table to determine the speed at which you’re attaining new fans.
How to Use Audience Growth Rate:
- Evaluate performance on each network. Identify which networks are generating the greatest growth and investigate how you can apply your success on those networks to others.
- Track your growth rate during the course of a campaign, product launch, or other new initiative to evaluate its success.
- Expand in the right demographic. Pay attention to the gender, age or location of new followers (some networks will provide this breakdown or you could manually investigate) to measure if your strategy is helping your brand reach your target audience.
- Research the competition. Measuring the Audience Growth Rate for top competitors will highlight what speed is realistic for your industry and help determine if you’re effectively growing your audience.
Share of Voice
Share of Voice helps you understand how your brand or company is performing in comparison to your competitors. The metric details what percentage of mentions within your industry or space are about your brand and what percentage is about the competition.
How to Measure Share of Voice:
To measure your Share of Voice, you first need to tally all of the mentions for your brand for a specific time table. Then, compile the mentions of each competitor in your industry for that same time period. To calculate Share of Voice, divide your mentions by the total number of mentions for the competition.
How to Use Share of Voice:
- Evaluate brand awareness and market share. Share of Voice will show just how much (or how little) of an impact you’re making in your industry.
- Calculate Share of Voice for more than just brand mentions—compare metrics around specific products, services or brand attributes.
- Competitive research. Calculate Share of Voice for a top competitor to evaluate its market share. Investigate the reasons for why it may be higher than yours and use them as inspiration when formulating ways to increase your share.
- Measure effectiveness of campaigns and other efforts. Benchmark your Share of Voice before beginning a campaign so you can measure any increase. Continue to measure to see if the campaign has any long term effects on brand awareness.
Engagement
Engagement measures how much and how often others interact with you and your content in social media. When someone takes the time to like, favorite or comment on something you’ve posted, they’re actively engaging with your content. Engagement metrics showcase audience action, which is important for social media health and growth.
A subset of engagement metrics are sharing metrics, which represent when people amplify your content. All of the major social networks allow users to share content whether it’s a retweet, share, reblog, repin, etc. Engagement metrics are important in highlighting the success of content, but depending on your goals, sharing metrics could be of higher value because they extend your content beyond your own audience, increasing its exposure.
How to Measure Engagement:
Every social network offers different engagement touch points, so each one will be measured differently. Here’s a breakdown of engagement metrics by platform:
Click Image To Enlarge
Additionally, some networks provide additional engagement metrics, which include:
- People Engaged: the number of people who have clicked on, liked, commented on, or shared a post.
- Engagement Rate: the number of people who have clicked on, liked, commented on, or shared a post divided by the post’s reach.
- Post-specific Scorecard: details the number of likes, comments, shares, and clicks on an individual post.
- Interactions: the number of times people have liked, commented on, or shared a post.
- Engagement Rate: the number of interactions, clicks, and followers acquired divided by the number of impressions (followers acquired are only included for sponsored updates).
Google+
- Total Engagement: combines the number of +1′s, shares and comments
How to Use Engagement Metrics:
- Guide your content strategy. Use engagement to understand what types of content or posts get attention—and more importantly, what types don’t.
- Target the right demographic. Pay attention to the gender, age or location of the people engaged (Facebook Insights provides this breakdown or you could manually investigate). If the majority of your engagement comes from people outside your target location or demographic, you’ll need to tweak your strategy.
- Measure the success of product launches, marketing campaigns or other new initiatives. Listen to feedback to inform future projects.
- Add context to exposure or reach. Tally sharing metrics like retweets or replies and divide them by exposure or reach to calculate an engagement percentage. This will tell you what percentage of your potential audience actively participated in a contest, read a blog post, etc.
- Measure growth and performance on specific social networks. Track your engagement rate over time to see how you’re improving.
- Find influencers or brand advocates. If there are people who consistently engage with you in social, consider utilizing them to help gain more exposure for future initiatives.
Reach
Reach is the potential audience for a message based on total follower count (Twitter, Pinterest and LinkedIn followers, total Likes on your Facebook page, etc). If your boards have 1,000 followers on Pinterest, then each of your pins could potentially reach 1,000 people.
It’s important to note that Facebook provides its own analytics around reach, which it defines as “the number of people who saw your post”. Facebook considers a post to reach someone when it’s shown in that person’s News Feed. They also provide “total reach,” which includes the number of unique people who saw any activity from a Page as well as paid vs. organic reach.
Exposure
Exposure further expands on your potential audience by measuring not just the number of your followers, but the number of followers each of your followers have. Each time a person shares something in social, it is delivered to their list of followers—each instance is called an impression. And those impressions are included in a message’s exposure. For example, if your company’s latest tweet was retweeted by a Twitter user with 10,000 followers, then the exposure for that tweet would include the number of impressions based on your audience plus the 10,000 impressions based on that specific user’s audience. Of course, not everyone who receives a post in their social feeds will read it, which is why exposure measures the potential audience.
How to Measure Reach and Exposure:
To measure your reach, you would tally your following on each social network—number of Twitter followers, Facebook page likes, LinkedIn followers or connections, Pinterest followers, etc. You can keep track of these stats manually or can use the analytics reports provided by each social network.
Measuring exposure on your own can be a bit tricky, especially if you’re looking to track the impressions of a particular campaign or market team. Quality social media management or analytics platforms will automatically track exposure for you. Or if you want to measure your content’s exposure manually, you can tally up your total follower count as well as each time your content is shared in social. For example, on Pinterest you would track the number of repins and the number of followers those who repined your post have, as well as pins from your website or blog. Focus on the sharing stats for each platform—retweets, shares, likes etc.—as well as links from your website or blog to calculate your average number of impressions.
How to Use Reach and Exposure:
- Track reach on each social network over time to determine where you’re seeing the most growth.
- Use exposure to measure the spread of a conversation to evaluate the success.
- Inform future initiatives. Determine what’s resonating with your audience by finding what types of content or messaging received the highest exposure. Use that research to perfect future campaigns or content creation.
- Track competitors’ exposure to view potential share of voice.
- Compare exposure to mentions to find potential influencers. If a specific post’s exposure was many times higher than its mentions, someone with a large social following is clearly distributing the content. Research the influencer and find ways to work together.
- Combine exposure and reach with engagement metrics to help form a more complete understanding of impact (look for a breakdown of engagement coming soon in this blog series!).
Sentiment
Sentiment refers to the emotion behind a social media mention. It’s a way to measure the tone of the conversation—is the person happy, annoyed, angry? Sentiment adds important context to social conversations. Without it, measurement of mentions alone could be misleading. If you were measuring mentions for your company’s new product, you might assume a surge in mentions meant it was being well received. After all, more mentions = more people talking about the product. But what if all those mentions were negative?
Measuring sentiment will help you understand the overall feeling surrounding a particular subject, enabling you to create a broader and more complete picture of the social conversations that matter to you.
How to Measure Sentiment:
Measuring sentiment on your own can be quite a time commitment, depending on the size of the conversation. To record the sentiment of mentions, you would read each one, evaluate the tone and assign a score such as positive, negative or neutral.
There are a few free tools available that track and measure sentiment and quality social media marketing platforms will provide automatic sentiment analysis. The uberVU via HootSuite platform uses a powerful automation tool to determine sentiment, which is based on machine learning technology. If a person was to tweet about their experience shopping at Sears, the sentiment would be determined based on the description words they use. “Such great deals at Sears!” would register as positive whereas “Customer service at Sears is the worst.” would register as negative.
How to Use Sentiment:
Evaluate Brand Health
- Analyzing sentiment on a regular basis will help you understand people’s feelings towards your brand, company or your product or service.
- Consider using a tool that provides automatic sentiment analysis to get a quick overview of your brand health without having to dive into each individual mention.
Head Off a Crisis
- Watch your sentiment level for any signals that could indicate a dramatic shift in brand health.
- A sudden spike in negative mentions could be an indication of a developing crisis. Loop in your PR department, dive into the mentions to find the cause, and establish a plan for handling the rise in negativity.
Competitive Research
- Sentiment analysis can also be used to find how your brand or product is being perceived in comparison to your top competitors.
- Keep an eye on the overall sentiment level of competitors and find opportunities (positive and negative) that you can use to shape your positioning against theirs.
Evaluate Campaigns and Other Initiatives
- Use sentiment levels to measure the success of product launches, marketing campaigns or other new initiatives.
- Track how levels change throughout the duration of the initiative to establish if it is being received positively or negatively. Consider adjusting your strategy if negativity rises.
- Did your increased sentiment level remain post campaign? Use the sentiment research to inform and perfect future initiatives.
Mentions
The first social metric you need to track is volume of mentions, which is the size of a conversation. Depending on your job role or function, you’ll want to track mentions for several different keywords such as your company, brand name, product or service, industry, the competition or a particular market term. This will give you a complete picture of the social conversations that matter most. Mentions are simply the number of times the term or phrase you’re tracking was used across social media, helping you understand just how much (or little) attention the subject is receiving in social.
How to Measure Mentions:
Mention volume is a simple (but tasking) counting metric. You can invest in a social media marketing platform that will automatically track the number of mentions for a specific search term for you. Or, you can count tweets, wall posts, etc.
How to Use Mentions:
Establish a Baseline
- Track mentions in recurring time periods (daily, weekly, etc) to establish the typical volume.
- Record benchmarks so you can accurately measure growth over time.
Take Action
- Find the right windows to engage. Are there certain days or times when mentions increase?
- Marketing should rearrange its content schedule to capture the attention of an active audience.
- Customer service and sales should be online and ready to engage with clients or prospects.
- React to spikes in mentions.
- PR should investigate a spike in brand mentions as it could signal a positive brand story they should amplify or a negative one they’ll need to get ahead of to prevent a potential crisis.
- A product team needs to understand the cause for a surge in market terms or features and evaluate how or if they need to react.
- Marketing should prepare competitive positioning when top competitors see a surge in volume.
- Use mentions to track if campaigns, product launches or other initiatives are gaining traction. Did mentions increase after launch? Are they remaining stagnant? Monitor mentions closely and consider making tweaks if you’re not seeing a reaction.
There you have it. Mentions: step one to measuring social media. Stay tuned tomorrow for our next Beginner’s Guide post, when we’ll break down sentiment.
Courtesy of an article dated April 24, 2014 appearing in The Uber Blog
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