Today, social media is responsible for driving a huge amount of marketing interactions. Through the numerous first- and second-degree connections social networking has made visible, businesses can leverage peer-to-peer influencing to create and maintain valuable relationships. But how can you measure your social marketing? How do you know what’s working, and what isn’t?
To sharpen your approach around creating social content, and ups the odds of high engagement, here are six things you should be measuring:
1. Campaign Visits
Campaign visits are the number of times a lead lands on the page containing your social profiles.
Take a look at the screenshot below, which shows a page from Marketo’s website. Notice that on the right, you can “like” the page on Facebook, tweet it on Twitter, or “Share” it on LinkedIn. We use our own technology to create messaging for these posts – our audience can either use the auto-filled language or write their own. We also use track the number of times someone loads this page – combined with the second metric, this helps us determine how often people are sharing each piece of content.
2. Interactions
Interactions are the number of times that prospects have interacted with your social profiles. Interactions might include signing up, voting, liking, etc.
When you’re tracking interactions, you’ll want to compare them with the number of campaign visits you’re getting (see the previous metric) – this will give you an idea of how engaged your social visitors are. You’ll also want to look at these numbers for each segment of your audience – this will help you understand how different segments are engaging differently with your content.
There are essentially three outcomes here:
- A low number of interactions, but a high number of campaign visits. This is a negative outcome. It could mean that you are doing a fantastic job at driving leads to your social profile, but they are uninterested in the content that lives on the page. It could also mean that your content is bettered suited to a different persona or segment of your database.
- A low number of interactions, and a low number of campaign visits. This is the worst of the three outcomes. It could mean that you aren’t driving leads to your social application, and the content does not resonate with those who do visit your page.
- A high number of interactions, and a high number of campaign visits. This is the best possible outcome. If you’re seeing high numbers from both, you’re doing a fantastic job of driving traffic to your site and targeting your audience with appropriate content. Keep up the good work!
3. Shares
Shares are the number of times prospects share one of your messages to their social network.
Shares are similar to interactions, but they’re an even better sign of social health. It’s a good thing when someone likes you on Facebook or follows you on Twitter, but when your prospects start to share and re-tweet posts for you, you’ll start to really see momentum.
4. Resulting Clicks
Resulting clicks are the number of times people responded to shares/re-tweets by visiting your social sites.
This is where you really start to see results. For the most part, people are more likely to trust their friends and family than to trust advertising, which is what makes social so powerful. If my sister were to share something on Facebook, I’ll probably check it out (unless it’s something like nail polish). But if I see the same exact content as a paid ad, I might not click through.
In short, if people are sharing your content, and it results in more engagement, you’re on the right track.
5. Registration
Registration is the number of people who follow a link to your social profile, and then, once there, fill out a form to receive an offer. This might be an appealing piece of content, a contest entry, a promotion – anything that requires them to sign up.
6. Influencers
Ultimately, all of your social campaigns should be driving new names for your database, and nurturing interested prospects. By leveraging social networks, you’re using your existing network to create an even bigger one.
Once your campaign is complete, and you have a significant amount of data, you’ll want to determine who your biggest influencer are – who is using their social networks to help widen your reach?
Take a look at the following report, which shows the influence of different people in a given network:
As you can see, Frank Tamari’s influence on Twitter is incredibly high, but none of the people he influenced converted. Conversely, Yasmine Arbab has a smaller social influence, but has a much higher conversion rate. If this was your report, you’d probably want to target people with profiles like Yasmine’s.
Other Metrics
Platforms like Marketo can give you even more valuable metrics, such as:
- Total profiles sign-ins: the number of people who sign into their account directly rom your social application.
- Influencers: the number of people who have generated shares for your post with their personal network.
- Social Reach: the number of people who can potentially see your post. For instance, if a single person with 1000 friends shared my post on Facebook, my social reach would be 1000.
- Social Impressions: the total number of times a post appears in news feeds, on walls, etc. as a result of sharing.
- Share rate: the percentage of visits to your social profile that generate shares.
- Clickback rate: the number of clicks each share generates.
- Social List: the ratio of visits to your social application that come directly from link shares, to the number of visits that came from other sources (i.e. website, email, etc.)
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