5 Ways To Measure Social Media Success
By Anna Johnson on January 11th, 2011So how do you measure your success in social media? By the number of Facebook fans or Twitter followers you have? The number of Facebook Likes or Twitter Retweets you get for your Tweets or web content? Or by the amount of traffic and sales you get from social media sites?
No doubt, the way(s) you measure social media success will depend on your social media objectives and strategy… and the extent to which you can actually measure the variables you’re interested in.
Nonetheless, here are a few metrics that might be worth keeping an eye on…
1. Social media views – the number of views of your social media content, whether it’s views of your Facebook fan page(s), YouTube channel or your blog.
2. Fans and followers – the number of fans, friends, followers and subscribers, etc who have elected to follow you online.
3. Likes, Retweets and Shares – the number of actions people take to recommend your content to others. These may take the form of Facebook Likes, Twitter Retweets or other kinds of shares and referrals.
4. Traffic – the amount of traffic your website(s) get from social media networks and websites, as indicated by your website analytics program.
5. Sales and conversions – the amount of sales or other conversions you can attribute to your social media activity, whether its social media advertising, messages you post, or other social media activities you engage in.
January 12th, 2011 at 9:46 am
Those are great measuring sticks…but I think that some things like better customer service, or your customer service department receiving less inquiries is also a good measure, just a little harder to track. The problem is that most jump on the social bandwagon and just expect that once they have a lot of followers or fans that the money will just come rolling in…they want, as a lot do these days, instant results and gratification…and when they don’t see that right away they abandon or lessen their use and focus on the social networks.
January 12th, 2011 at 7:16 pm
Excellent points Ron. Some companies – such as Dell in the U.S. and Coles and Telstra in Australia – are specifically using Twitter to respond to customer comments, deal with customer complaints, etc.