Monitoring your social media ROI
To make sure that your message is reaching the right audience and producing the desired outcome, organizations should measure its social media outreach efforts. Monitoring and evaluating how your messages on social media is being consumed can determine if you are getting the most return on your investment (ROI). Following are some insights and metrics tools to consider.
- Use metrics that will help you make decisions: the purpose of using metrics is to use the data to decide what actions you need to take to enhance your advocacy efforts. For instance, if you want to find out which content is most consumed by your followers, you would use viewed, downloaded, or listened metrics. If you want to see which content most resonated with followers, you would look at which content was shared the most. Depending on what actions you want to take (i.e.: you want the followers to take action, drive them to another forum, or engage further in discussion, etc.) the type of metrics you use will be different.
- Definitions of common social media metrics: the following are most popular metrics used to measure how you are interacting with your followers on social media tools.
- Conversions = the number of people who achieved a desired result. This could be signing up for a campaign petition, or completing a survey, or any other goal you’ve set up for your campaign.
- Leads = potential conversions. These include anyone with the need or interest to join your campaign.
- Engagement = the total number of likes, shares, and comments on a post on Twitter, Facebook, blogs, etc.
- Reach = a measurement of the size of audience you are communicating with.
- Impressions = a look at how many people saw your post.
- Funnels = the paths that visitors take toward converting.
- Visits vs. unique visits = Visits count each time a person visits your site or page, regardless of whether or not they have visited before. Uniques count each person only once.
- Exit rate = the percentage of people who leave your site from a given page. It’s possible these people have browsed other pages of your site before exiting.
- Time on site = a measure in minutes and seconds of how long a visitor stays on your site before exiting.
- Audience growth rate = a comparison of your audience today to your audience yesterday, last week, last month, etc.
- Average engagement rate = individual post engagement compared to overall followers.
- Response rates = These can be measured in two ways, either as the speed with which you respond to comments and replies on social media, or how quickly your marketing or sales department follows up with leads from social.
- Inbound links = the number of sites linking back to your website or page.
- Improve your social media strategy using the metric results: once you have your metrics, use that knowledge to adjust your social media strategy. If your campaign is not reaching your desired goal, then you should change your strategy so that you achieve your goal, whether that’s to spread your message to more people, engage more people into discussions, or to encourage them to take actions.
- Examples of social media monitoring tools
- Google Analytics is a power tool to analyze specific sites or apps to help you measure traffic and engagement, even helping you segment how your how people are landing to your site or app.
- Facebook Insights is similar to Google Analytics, and helps you measure engagement of your Page. As a Page administrator, your dashboard gives you access to various metrics, including daily active users, monthly active users, daily news likes, and more.
- Twitter Analytics gives you insights into how your Tweets are resonating with your followers. There are many metrics, including impression, profile visits, mentions, etc. You can also use the tool to get other details like how people are interacting with your tweets over time.
- Buffer is a tool that lets you post on different social platforms at once, schedule your posts, as well as a built-in analytics tool to measure all linked-social media tools. You can also build an RSS feed, and discover new content.
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