How do we know that social media is worth our time? In this post, I’ll look at what social media metrics to measure and how to analyse results and evaluate return on investment (ROI).
Start with your objectives for using social media.
Do you want to generate leads? Do you want to promote an eBook? Do you want more likes? Do you want more traffic? Do you want to increase sales? Your objectives will let you know what you need to measure, whether it’s database entries, downloads, likes, traffic, or conversions. None of these objectives are wrong or right. You have to decide which is most important for you. Then you have to ask yourself how much time you’re willing to devote to social media, based on the results of the metrics. Your objectives will inform your metrics. For example, if you have a blog, what should you measure? Is it the number of posts that you’re going to contribute? Is the number of comments? Keep in mind that metrics are pointless unless you’re comparing them to something. For example, we don’t get a lot of comments on our blog posts, but other sites where they’re opinion pieces get hundreds of comments. Therefore, the number of comments may not be a great metric for us since so much of our posts are instructional or educational, rather than opinionated or controversial. What should you measure? Is it the number of subscribers for your blog? Is it incoming links to your blog? Or is it your SEO rank? Ask yourself, “What has worked well in the past?”
A couple of months ago, I posted a quote from Richard Branson on Facebook, one of my all-time favourite entrepreneurs, and we had hundreds of people sharing this quote: “I don’t think of work as work and play as play. It’s all living.”
For some reason, that quote resonated, and so it was shared and shared and shared. Based on that experience, if we wanted, we could post one inspiring quote by an entrepreneur each week and see which one works best. It’s a matter of choosing your battles – and these battles, represented by metrics, change across social media platforms. I recommend Google Analytics as a free metrics program. If you have a Facebook page, you can see what they call insights. This is built right into Facebook, and it doesn’t cost you a cent. It shows total likes, how many people are talking about the page at the moment, and if your stats are trending up or down in very obvious green or red (green for up and red for down). Major blogging platforms also have built-in metrics. Every day, we run a report for our bloggers so that we can show them their top three articles and most shared articles. Based on this information about what works, the writers know how to tweak and target future articles. Are you getting a ROI on your time? It depends. What are your objectives, and how much time are you putting into social media?
