Social media is booming last ten years and today every business is relying on marketing their brand on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc. For those who are advertising your businesses on Social Media or have some social media campaign that you are trying to promote, how do you get your return on investment (ROI). Too many of you rely on the easy answers like “we gained this many new Twitter followers, this many Retweets, this many Facebook shares”, etc etc. Yes, these social media metrics do offer insights into how a campaign or piece of content performed, but it’s just a surface insight. They don’t really show you how your efforts are helping boost the bottom line.
It’s time to step things up so that your social media analytics better reflect how your hard work is paying off.
Here we give you a rundown of social networking metrics you might be following and how to take it up to the next level.
1. Tracking link clicks is not enough; track click-through with bounce rate
While click-through rates are important metric as an indicator of how compelling your social media message is to spark an interest in your audience, these clicks provide more information on your ROI when coupled with your bounce rate.
Bounce rates are a reference to the percentage of visitors to your page who leave the website after only viewing one page. In social media terms, it would mean someone clicking on a link that was posted on Facebook or Twitter, reaching your website or blog, then leaving without viewing any other content.
Why is bounce rate an important mechanism to track for your web properties as it relates to social media? Because it allows you to powerfully illustrate your social ROI by comparing it to your other sources of web traffic.
To track this metric, you have to sign up for analytics provider like Google Analytics for example. If you use Google Analytics, then you can go to the “Acquisition” tab and look under “All Traffic” for the “Channels” section. When you click on the “Bounce Rate” button, it should rank all of the channels from bounce rate to highest.
2. Not just web referrals but track share of traffic driven also
Suppose, search has a bounce rate that is as high as your social media, but drives 20 times the traffic, social media is still going to look less valuable in comparison. Hence, social media managers should track more than just the amount of traffic driven and start tracking the share of traffic driven by social.
You can track this in the same manner as you tracked your bounce rate. Again using Google Analytics as an example, under the Acquisition and Channels tab, then click on “Sessions’ field. This will list all the channels rank wise based on the number of sessions they drive. In the column next to the actual number, you will see a small percentage figure. This percentage is the share of traffic being driven by each channel.
3. Mentions are not enough, track social share of voice
While mentions are important, this metric is more valuable when it is used to show how you stack up against your competitors by tracking your social share of voice.
In a simple way, social share of voice provides the details of how much percentage of mentions within the industry your brand gets and the percentage about your competitors. This helps you in two ways: you know now that all your competitors are also on social media and that you are doing it better than they are. This metric helps eliminate doubts about the worth of being in social media and also shows you the progress your social efforts have made. If you track your social share of voice consistently, it will become a powerful tool for your social media campaign as it pays off, while you surpass your competitors and become a leader in your field.
Tracking this can be done by calculating all the mentions of your brand and those of your competitors to know the share of your mentions. This is a more conventional way of tracking social share of voice.
4. Track conversation rates, not merely comments
It is generally thought that the number of comments left on each post reflects the success of your campaign or post. However, this is a somewhat useless information which does not have any context. A much better way to report this metric is by calculating your conversation rate, which was coined by Avinash Kaushik, author and digital marketing guru at Google.
Conversation rate means the ratio of comments per post to the number of overall followers (or Page Likes) you have.This can be done for not just one of your social networks but also for all of them. The advantage of this metric is that, it helps you determine how much of your audience feels compelled to add their voice to the content you put up on social media. In other words, according to Kaushik, “Is what you are saying interesting enough to spark the most social of all things; a conversation?”
