From the Amazon Best Seller Transformative Digital Marketing.
Social channels have metrics that are specific for their channels. Twitter Retweets, which are forwarded or reposted messages, are similar but not identical to shares on other social channels. The result of shares can be interaction and engagement, but not always a huge uplift on new friends and followers. On Twitter, however, if someone with a large network retweets your content, there is an opportunity for significant growth in followers. Let’s take a look at key metrics of major social channels:
Followers
Shows how many individuals follow your account and therefore is an indication of the potential reach of your tweets.
Replies
Shows how engaged your audience is with what you share in your Tweets. A large total number of replies to a post can reveal hot topics that interest your customers.
Retweets
The total number of retweets indicates how shareable an audience believes your content is. It also helps you reach new Twitter users that were not previously engaged with your brand.
Clicks
This shows the traffic that moves to your landing pages. You can track specific URLs with tools like Google Analytics. This brings you closer to conversions by specific campaigns.
Measurement Platform
OMG. There are a lot of tools to measure Twitter metrics, including Twitter itself. Hootsuite https://hootsuite.com is one of the go-to platforms for Twitter and other social platforms combining analytics with social media optimization. They have tools that help you understand where your social profiles are growing the fastest and monitor spikes in brand sentiment based on social media posts. Measure clicks, likes, retweets and other behavior to determine what content resonates with your audience.
O.K. The largest social network is already part of your social media strategy.
Fans
The total number of people who have “Liked” your page and agree to have you post content that is shared on their newsfeed. A fan is similar to a “content prospect.” You don’t know yet whether this person will view, like, comment on, share or otherwise engage with your content… but you know you want them in the room! One metric of success will be the growth rate of fans over specific periods of time (weekly, monthly)… both organic and paid.
Reach
Post reach is the number of people who have seen your post. Your post counts as reaching someone when it is shown in the News Feed. But remember not everyone really sees everything in their feed… it is estimated that only 1 – 2 % of people are really reached. The figures you see are for the first 28 days after a post was created and include people viewing posts on desktop and mobile. Options on Reach include:
- organic versus paid
- fans versus non-fans
Engagement
Engagement rate is the percentage of people who saw a post and then reacted to, shared, clicked or commented on it. It is a useful metric as it indicates the relevance of the content you are presenting to your audience. For example, if you acquire part of your audience with a contest you may learn that these people are hiding the brand content from their newsfeed and not sharing and your reach will go down over time. Specific details include:
- post clicks
- reactions, comments and shares
- negatives including unlikes and reports of spam
It is possible have a post that has great Reach but poor Engagement OR one that has low Reach and great Engagement. In other words your post has a Reach of 2,000 but an Engagement of 2%… that’s not good. It’s much better to have a post that Reaches 300 and has Engagement of 18%. Use metrics to learn about content…. and use content to create a dynamic conversation.
Likes & Reactions Provide Emotional Intelligence
The measure of how many people have clicked ‘Like’ on your page and accept the content you send in their newsfeed. When content is ‘Liked’ it is exposed to the viewer’s friends who may also click ‘Like’. Facebook has expanded the content LIKE to include a total of six “REACTIONS” including Like, Love, Haha, Wow, Sad and Angry. These add more options for content review and (theoretically) a deeper understanding of audience sentiment, or emotional intelligence. In fact when you investigate the Reactions on a Post you can quickly see how the audience feels about the topic. It is a good measure of a group of people who share common interests…. and who doesn’t want to be Loved?
Comments
Comments are a better measure of how engaged people are with your content because A. they have to actually spend more than 1 second typing and B. you can use the content to get a reading on the success and engagement. Comments are public and can help a businesses engage more personally with customers… if you take the time to do it!
Shares
People who find your content interesting and click Share can make it available to their network of friends, or a Group or Page they manage. This is a great measure of engagement and viral lift (how quickly it grows). People that share are brand evangelists and, if they have a large base of friends and fans, can make a rapid impact on a campaign. If you know your Influencers, you can share posts directly on their Timeline and/or in private messages.
Measurement Platform
Sprinklr offers a comprehensive social suite for Enterprise social management at https://www.sprinklr.com/
Photos drive engagement on social networks… and it is the foundation of Instagram.
Followers
How large is your audience? This is the number of followers. The growth rate by which Instagram users start to follow your account can indicate how well you are doing. Connect the growth of Followers to your content, photos, videos.
Engagement As a Percentage of Followers
Measure the number of Likes (i.e. hearts) and comments against your follower count to get an engagement percentage per total followers.
Love Rating
This shows how much your follower base likes your media. You can even use tools to check “Filter Impact” that shows how each photo filter you use compares for number of comments and likes.
Engagement Per Post
Here’s what we want. How much engagement do you get for specific posts and what can you learn?
Clickthroughs
If you are going to measure clickthroughs from Instagram to your landing pages (or other), use a bit.ly or other short link to get the metrics.
Measurement Platform
Iconosquare http://iconosquare.com provides a series of useful metrics in an easy-to-use dashboard. The engagement (love rate and talk rate) and the viral life (spread rate) can be found on individual posts and rapidly shared on Twitter.
Learning Across Platforms
When you have a campaign running across multiple platforms as part of your omni-channel strategy, it can be extremely time consuming to review and make sense of analytics on multiple channels. This is where the new breed of data capture, reporting and analysis platforms comes in. Some of these third party suites have partnerships with the social channels which allow them to capture and report on data that may not be available to you as an individual or a business. More importantly they offer a single place where you can get a snapshot of campaigns and content elements running across platforms. This is particularly important if you want to:
- Compare several campaigns that are running at the same time.
- See how audiences on different channels respond to the same message or campaign.
- Make small adjustments in messaging and rapidly learn how it impacts different audiences.
Visit Bill Eager at https://williameager.com for more
