Social media measurement is something that I think should be undertaken with a sense of perspective, by standing back and looking at the big picture.
A widescreen approach to social media measurement ultimately looks at the things that really matter: sales, profits, customer satisfaction and loyalty. Besides, honing in on the detail might not be the best use of your time, given the obvious difficulties that arise, particularly with attribution.
But standing back and looking at the bigger picture is not going to be enough for your data-mad boss, is it? It’s a bit too soft focus, right? He or she is going to want to see proof that all this social optimisation is actually working.
If that’s the case, then don’t worry: there are lots of things you can measure...
It’s all about engagement
When we talk about social optimisation (a term I prefer to 'social media') we're really talking about driving engagement and interaction. The goal of any social optimisation strategy is to provide the right tools so that people can engage with your brand / people / products / services onsite and offsite.
Here’s what you want to happen:
- You want people to make a noise.
- You want people to store and share things.
- You want people to love your website.
- You want people to visit more frequently
- You want people to refer your company to their friends.
- You want people to buy into your brand.
- You want people to buy your products.
Engaged customers and prospects are far more likely to do some or all of the above. So how can you boost customer engagement?
Give people the right tools
The tools and onsite functionality you need is going to depend on your business, your strategy and your goals. What you're ultimately looking for is a wide range of tools to help people interact. It doesn’t matter whether this interaction happens onsite or offsite, but only that it happens. You can measure it either way.
This list of KPIs / metrics should help you figure out what can be measured (at a nano level) and also what kind of tools / functionality you may want to introduce. I still think it’s best to measure from a distance but if your boss wants the detail then this list should help you work out what to look at. In doing so you’ll able to determine the relative success and adoption of new features. You may also unearth trends and spot opportunities or issues.
In any event, taking a top-down look at interaction - and monitoring how customer engagement changes over time - can really help you position your company as a community-centric organisation, by proving that an investment into customer engagement is a wise one. Your boss should be happy if all goes to plan.
Making interaction a game
This list has been largely informed by a new social commerce startup that I’m working on. It’s essentially a marketplace that connects buyers with sellers. I created a ‘kudos’ algorithm that helps us curate the website. Items that are highly rated and that attract lots of comments / bookmarks / followers will gain kudos points. We apply different weightings to different interactions (for example, a ‘love this’ rating is worth less than a ‘follow item’). Editors / curators can then spot the buzz and act accordingly (better promotion, interviews, videos, etc).
We created ‘kudos’ for a few reasons. Firstly, we want to learn from the crowd. Secondly, we want the website to be highly interactive. Thirdly, we want it to feel like a game for the sellers, just like Digg is for the article submitters.
So tracking and making sense of interaction is a fundamental part of our web venture. Many of these metrics are factored into our algorithm, and in the same way you can score different interactions to create some kind of interaction index. It might help you condense all of this data noise into a more digestible format.
Caveats!
Before we jump into the list there are a few caveats...
- Not all websites are equal. Not all of these will be relevant to all sites (e.g. 'Posts' won't be any good for sites without blogs and contributors)
- Not all interactions are equal. 'Print page' as an engagement measure is barely worth looking at... or is it? In any case, some of these things are more important than others (hence my scoring / ‘kudos’ algorithm).
- There is some crossover. For example ‘bookmarks’ and ‘wishlists’ may be the same thing on your site (although they’re not on mine).
- Some metrics will have sub-metrics.
- Avoid curve balls. If the widget sucks then it doesn’t matter that 10,000 people installed it last week. It will still suck and they’ll hate it.
- Human power is needed to really understand the detail behind the numbers, and to act on that knowledge. Interpretation is key.
- It’s about quality not quantity. Don’t go counting those spam comments!
- This is a bit of a braindump and I’ll certainly have missed out various things, so please leave your pointers and suggestions in the comments section below. What are you measuring?
A list of social interaction metrics / KPIs
- Alerts (register and response rates / by channel / CTR / post click activity)
- Bookmarks (onsite, offsite)
- Comments
- Downloads
- Email subscriptions
- Fans (become a fan of something / someone)
- Favourites (add an item to favourites)
- Feedback (via the site)
- Followers (follow something / someone)
- Forward to a friend
- Groups (create / join / total number of groups / group activity)
- Install widget (on a blog page, Facebook, etc)
- Invite / Refer (a friend)
- Key page activity (post-activity)
- Love / Like this (a simpler form of rating something)
- Messaging (onsite)
- Personalisation (pages, display, theme)
- Posts
- Profile (e.g. update avatar, bio, links, email, customisation, etc)
- Print page
- Ratings
- Registered users (new / total / active / dormant / churn)
- Report spam / abuse
- Reviews
- Settings
- Social media sharing / participation (activity on key social media sites, e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Digg, etc)
- Tagging (user-generated metadata)
- Testimonials
- Time spent on key pages
- Time spent on site (by source / by entry page)
- Total contributors (and % active contributors)
- Uploads (add an item, e.g. articles, links, images, videos)
- Views (videos, ads, rich images)
- Widgets (number of new widgets users / embedded widgets)
- Wishlists (save an item to wishlist)
Learn more...
Check out Econsultancy CEO Ashley Friedlein’s 33-slide presentation on using social media for marketing, which includes a case study on our own Twitter strategy. There’s also a social media briefing if you want to catch up with social media trends.
Additionally, we have lots of template files for web professionals, including some that you can use to define a social media strategy, to figure out how to monitor your brand on social networks, and to create a social media policy for your company.
Chris Lake is editor in chief at Econsultancy, entrepreneur and long-term internet fiend. Follow him on Twitter or connect via Linkedin.
Posted 30 October 2009 14:30pm by Chris Lake with 19 comments
Tags: Social Media, measurement, interaction, engagement, metrics, kpis
Topics: Online PR & Social Media, Web Analytics & Optimisation
Sectors: Financial Services, Publishing, Media & Entertainment, Retail, Travel & Leisure
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Graham Charlton
Strategy & Planning
2:45PM on 30th October 2009
Chris,
We have been trying hard to find some good measureables for one client for a while now - really showing how much an impact social media is having on their business.
This is a great list!
How these translate into real business is the next crucial step though.
Thanks,
Dave L
3:29PM on 30th October 2009
This is a great article and I really agree - measuring engagament is probably the single most important metric for marketers these days. But how can you do it in real life? The issue is that most people will have a hard time first measuring and then tracking more than 4 or 5 KPIs across different marketing programs.
In our experience, virtual events provide the ideal environment for marketers to measure the engagement level of their participants. We created the Unisfair Engagement Index, which tracks and then combines most of the metrics you listed into a single variable. It also considers additional information such a content from chat or polls.
This allows marketers to automatically rank all of their participants in a virtual event, so that the most engaged attendees - considered the hottest leads - can receive immediate attention. A simple point system helps our users to customize the lead scoring mechanism by adding weights to the attributes they value most. By defining lead ranking criteria upfront, they don’t waste time trying to make sense of their leads after an event is over.
3:34PM on 30th October 2009
This is a great list of metrics. I would suggest tracking these metrics over time and comparing them to revenue over time. This way, you can find a correlation between revenue growth and growth in certain metrics, which will tell you what social media strategies have been effective and why they were effective.
1:11AM on 31st October 2009
Another good tool/metrics is with the goals and funnels on google analytics.
2:12PM on 31st October 2009
Truly a very informative article, rightly talking about looking at the big picture. A must read for anybody looking for information in regards to social media measurement. Good job.
3:23PM on 31st October 2009
I thank you for this post. New companies are setting up their business by providing social media marketing and coverage for brands. It is simply fantastic and I am going to do the same at my company, upcoming new website www.swissiteinternational.com. So this post is really helpful to define how to measure social media enagagement. A good start to speak then about ROI.
11:01PM on 31st October 2009
Anybody who can be this detailed and specific is an ace in my book. I'm getting pretty tired of the generalities. Every one of your bullet points is worthy of a some discussion about whether it applies (to a specific situation) and how much weight to give it. The sum of those discussions would be more internal clarity about what we want the site, the marketing, and even the product to be doing. Thanks!
2:12AM on 2nd November 2009
A simple point system helps our users to customize the lead scoring mechanism by adding weights to the attributes they value most. By defining lead ranking criteria upfront, they don’t waste time trying to make sense of their leads after an event is over.
10:38AM on 2nd November 2009
Thank you for the article! The list is great, and I think it is not only the list to check AFTER a social media initiative, but should also be viewed as a to do list BEFORE the launch of the initiative.
Editor in Chief at Econsultancy
11:06AM on 2nd November 2009
Many thanks for all of your comments / suggestions / retweets. It's proving to be excellent food for thought...
@Carl - I absolutely agree that making correlations over time is the only sensible way to go about measuring success. Technically there are lots of options if you want accuracy, but I'm not sure that it's necessary to measure everything to the Nth degree (the more you automate and build this stuff into your system / processes the better). If your profits, customer lifetime value and satisfaction rates are going up - as well as your engagement levels - then I think it's safe to say that this stuff works. Besides, the TV advertisers have relied on correlations for half a century to prove effectiveness, so why can't we? ; )
@Chiara - you're right to make the distinction about measuring engagement vs measuring ROI. Some of the things on this list are more time consuming / labour intensive than others, and may not generate a return in the first instance, although many of us are sowing the seeds for future success, by making e.g. Twitter / Facebook a core part of our strategy. As such there may be an upfront investment in time / energy required to kickstart a proper engagement strategy that works over the long term.
12:03PM on 2nd November 2009
good list. v. useful
seems to me much of it works just as well for publishers of content sites as well, as these are good generic measures of engagement
4:20PM on 2nd November 2009
Nice post Chris, and useful ammo for the engagement-not-ROI crowd. Interesting and mildly ironic that the only "engagement" action not listed is an online purchase ;-)
Have posted a detailed response here http://www.socialcommercetoday.com/?p=878, but are you not simply measuring interaction as a proxy for attention - which of course is a necessary condition for impact? Why are we bothering with the "engagement" term at all in social media marketing - it's poorly defined and badly operationized. Until we can prove the value of engagement (which means defining it) then how do we know engagement is a good thing? Despite the heroic list, still think Dollars spent to Dollars returned is the only way to measure social media marketing.
Editor in Chief at Econsultancy
5:06PM on 2nd November 2009
Hey Paul,
Thanks for the comment and article. Good points, well made.
I'm wearing more of a customer / visitor engagement hat, and also focusing on pre-sale engagement metrics (I've left out 'add to cart' as well as 'purchase', and there will be others... they should probably be in here). The things in my list represent some of the things you can measure, though not all are going to generate ROI, and they won't prove it either. They might tell you more about your platform / products / processes, and what your users like (and don't like).
Many of these things represent the things you can do to create a sticky, interactive and likeable web experience, and hopefully one that will increase engagement onsite and offsite. Further analysis into sales / profits / loyalty rates etc might tell you whether all this engagement is helping to move the needle in those key areas. Some of these things are simple bits of functionality that in themselves don't really cost anything to launch or maintain, but can help keep people tuned in.
You can correlate and make sense of trends, and you can benchmark where you're at. For example, this blog generates 3.5 times more comments than it did last year, partly as a result of us embracing Twitter and improving our overall functionality (there is still much to do). We can also see that the blog directly helps to convert readers to registered users and also paying subscribers, once they investigate our research and training. And all of this social love helps with the Google rankings. As such I'm in no doubt that engagement measurably works for us.
But you're absolutely right: dollars in vs dollars returned is the key thing to look at. Maybe next time around I'll try to focus a bit more on ROI, as opposed to performance indicators.
5:42PM on 2nd November 2009
Great article! I truly believe that in today's world it's all about engaging visual content that augments a company's presence/brand. Engagement can mean a lot of different things to different groups too. Measurement is key and a ranking type of system is mandatory in order to provide insight into what the customer is really "getting" from your company. We have been using a points based system of measuring user interaction for the past 6 months and we still have a ton of work to do to get MyBoothSpace.com to the level where we feel it can be for both customers and vendors.
9:29AM on 3rd November 2009
Be careful about adding mulitipliers to these metrics. Not all organizations would agree that a "follow" is less important than a "love this" -- What if you're not selling a product, but rather are advocating a position. What's important is that each organization decide for itself what metrics are most important. No one is going to track all 35, what's important is to track the ones that are most closely associated with the organizations mission -- whether that be sales, donations, memberships or advicacy.
1:29PM on 4th November 2009
Could you perhaps site some examples of metrics tools you're using to track these individual KPI's? Sure Google Analytics is great - but it won't cover all of these.
Editor in Chief at Econsultancy
2:33PM on 4th November 2009
Hi Uncle,
Google Analytics can certainly be used to help you track social media activity, but many of the things I've listed will need either human power of inbuilt admin / reporting tools.
For example, at Econsultancy we can generate reports for 'comments' or 'forum posts' to track monthly trends over time, and there's are displays in our admin dashboard so we can see these numbers on a daily basis (if we want to! 57 new comments so far today!). This reporting functionality was built into our platform by our tech team.
In other cases, such as measuring offsite action, you can use a bit of human power or third party tools. I reckon most times you'll audit / benchmark, rather than making this a daily chore (I can't stand the idea of people being told to produce spreadsheets every day to track this level of detail - micromanagement sucks). So you'll be taking a snapshot in order to see how you progress over time. You can do the same thing in 1 / 3 / 12 months to check out the results of your efforts, and make some correlations with sales / loyalty / profits etc.
As mentioned, the social commerce startup I'm working on lumps together a lot of these metrics (but not all of them) and applies various weightings that are appropriate to our business, and that's another way of automatically measuring activity and trends.
Cheers,
c.
5:25AM on 9th November 2009
seems to me much of it works just as well for publishers of content sites as well, as these are good generic measures of engagement
10:53PM on 9th November 2009
interesting stuff, thanks