You can spend hours every day playing with and analyzing your website data on Excel, but a lot of this information is not really useful for evaluating your overall performance and success. Below are five social media metrics that we find most useful for most type of businesses:
1. Social Buttons
Social media buttons, such as Google "pluses", Facebook "likes", LinkedIn "shares", and Twitter "tweets" usually have counters on them where you can see how many people liked or shared your content. This is the starting point for measuring your social media campaign efforts, but it is especially important for campaigns whose goal is to increase awareness.
2. Social Citations
Do people mention your company on social media? How many citations do you get compared to your competition? You can sign up to Google alerts with your company name as a keyword to trace all citations or you can use social media marketing tools provided by such companies as MajesticSEO, HubSpot and others (find more tools from the articles on this post: 50 best website marketing articles of 2012). To determine your performance, divide the number of your citations by the total number of social citations (yours and your competition).
3. Referrals
Track how many people retweet, share and comment on your content on social media sites. This can help you gauge your content creation strategy. Here is a list of three tools to track retweets or use the Twitter free search tool. Your retweet performance can be determined by dividing the number of your tweets by the total number of tweets. This, however, is not the most accurate metric. A more accurate way will be to divide by the total of number of tweets in your area of specialization, and even more specifically, by the total number of tweets about your immediate competitors. There are many individual free and commercial tools that you can use to track user interaction, but we prefer to use an excellent and free Google Analytics. Here is a great article on how to enable social media interaction tracking on Google Analytics (get your website designer to set it up for you once, and use it from then on).
4. Clicks of Interest
Track click-through links from social media sites to your website. Using tools like Google URL builder will help you track all your campaign and clearly view all the different types of clicks inside your Google Analytics account. Needless to say, this is where you would want to check what domains have links pointing to your site. Use free Google Webmaster tools (need to sign up) to check all your external and internal links.
5. Clicks to Action
The ultimate goal of all marketing campaigns, including social media marketing, is to increase revenue and generate sales. With the exception of the awareness campaigns, generating quality leads or direct sales is the ultimate objective of most businesses. Hence, measuring how many user registrations, downloads or purchases resulted from your social media campaign is your ultimate success metric. This, too, can be enabled on Google Analytics by setting up "goals" and "goal conversion on Google Analytics".
In addition, when your sales people receive inquiries over the phone, they need to ask about the "source", i.e. how did you find us and record the number of social media referrals in your customer relationship management database or simply an Excel sheet.
Customer calls and website registrations/inquiries about your products or services are the ultimate metrics of your overall Marketing strategy.
