Social Media Optimization: Metrics to Measure
October 20th, 2009 | 
Author: 
Social media is a powerful force and represents either the biggest marketing shift since television advertising or the most colossal waste of time since, well, television. If it is positive, how can you define ’success’? The answer is different for every business. What follows are some metrics you might consider measuring.
Activity Metrics
Before starting a social media campaign, you have to have a baseline, a starting point used for reference and measurement. By knowing where you stand, you can easily analyze the success or failure of your marketing efforts.
Sheer numbers are meaningless by themselves, but used in conjunction with other numbers will give you a better overall look at your efforts. The activities you can measure include:
- Time periods: day, week, month, year, fiscal quarter or year
- Visitors, unique visitors
- Page views
- New members, retention rate of existing members
- Average time spent on site
- Comments and Trackbacks
- Contributors, active contributors
- Comments
- Referrals
- Frequency of: visits, posts, comments
ROI Metrics
Increasing the sheer numbers without regard to sales is shortsighted. If the numbers have increased without any increase in sales, the campaign is a financial failure. Some numbers don’t lead directly to the bottom line, but have an indirect effort, especially over time. The metrics you can measure are:
- Marketing/Sales
- Cost per lead
- Number of leads
- Number of qualified leads
- Ratio of qualified leads to all leads
- Time frame from lead to sale
- Lead conversion
- Average revenue per new customer and existing customer
- Lifetime value of customer
- Visitor value
- Customer Service
- Customer satisfaction
- Percentage of support tickets per x number of customers
- Average cost per support ticket
- Human Resources
- Employee turn over percentage
- Time to hire
- Hiring cost
- Training cost
- Acclimation time for new employees
Survey Metrics
Taking surveys of website visitors and clients can reveal a wealth of information, if asked correctly (which is no small feat). Fewer questions asked results in a higher percentage of responses. Survey metrics include:
- Satisfaction: products, services, prices, shipping, customer service, and warranties/guarantees
- Likelihood of referring others
- Relevance of content, connections
Individual Metrics
- New ‘followers’ (Twitter), ‘friends’ (Facebook) or ‘connections’ (LinkedIn) after 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, 6 months, 1 years
- Number of online friends met offline
- Percentage of online friends who did business with you
Search Engine Metrics
A successful social media campaign should be reflected in the search engines. Your analytics program should also show the trends which coincide with your campaign. The metrics for search engines include:
- Visibility for keywords
- Alexa traffic ranking
- Number of back links
Finally, some metrics show an almost immediate effect, while others take time. Measuring your efforts gives you the information needed to concentrate on the areas delivering the highest returns and shore up the areas with the highest negative numbers, all of which should add up to more money flowing to the business.
Got a success story? Feel free to share it in the comments section below.
Informative post. I’m not quite sure just how to take this social media phenomenon. Sometimes it feels like such a waste of time and then there are those occasions were the benefits really seem to be worth it.
Thank you for your compliments, Roschelle. Learning how to maximize social media is still a challenge for the vast majority of businesses. For those who have figured it out, the profits have been superb. I hope that happens for you, too!
-Luke