When you’re spending time, money and resources on social media, blogs and other outbound marketing efforts, naturally you want to see results. Real business results, like leads generated and sales made, in real time.
But is measuring social media metrics themselves valuable? And do they tell you anything about achieving those real business goals? The answers are yes, and, eventually, yes.
First, if you’re just starting out with social media for business (or perhaps starting to really invest some time in those dormant accounts), tracking simple stats such as likes and follows (audience size), number of comments and shares, and inbound search engine terms over a few months can give you an idea of how your audience is growing and what moves them.
But don’t stop there—what are those numbers telling about you about your reach, engagement and influence?
Reach
The sheer number of people liking your page or following your updates tells you something about the number of potential customers and leads aware of and interested in hearing from you. But it doesn’t say much about your relationship with them. How many people are talking about you, on the other hand? How influential are your followers? Are you reaching out to followers and influencers—retweeting their interesting content, for example?
Engagement
There are a number of ways to measure social media engagement. One is time spent and pageviews per unique visitor to your blog. Tallying and comparing likes and comments can tell you what kinds of posts have an impact. Another is dividing number of likes and follows of your page by the number talking about you to get an idea of how many brand advocates you have. And going back to relationships, count your “repeat customers” and “superfans”—who and how many people consistently like, comment, share and retweet your content over a given period.
Influence
In social media strategy, shares are golden. They happen when an individual likes your content enough to make their own content out of it and push it out to their networks. Going “viral” is arguably the goal of every piece of content you put out there. But any actions taken on your content are a measure of its influence—its power of persuasion—on your audience. Did a particular blog post bump the number of subscribers to the blog or visits to your website?
Ultimately, you want to be able to connect your social media influence to brand recognition and sales conversion—from fan to lead to customer to repeat customer. So when the C-suite asks you whether social media is paying off, show them the numbers.
