MMC6730 Assignments Week 9 — Content Post
Why are social media metrics important? Our reading this week taught us that social media metrics are crucial to providing social media managers a way to measure and track performance and realize specific goals across social. Terms for metrics vary from platform to platform, but there are an important set of broad metric categories that are relevant for almost all social media platforms. Here I will briefly detail the most important social media metrics and discuss what they track.
Engagement covers likes, comments, shares, and clicks, and measures how much and how often audience accounts are interacting with the account that I am monitoring. Tracking engagement can tell me if my content is drawing enough interest from audience accounts to inspire them to engage with my account. Low engagement signals a disinterested audience, high engagement usually signals strong interest, both negative and positive!
Awareness covers impressions & reach. Impressions are how many times one of my post’s shows up in the timeline of relevant or targeted audience accounts. Reach is a projection of unique viewers a post could have. Tracking awareness metrics can tell you how visible your content is to audience accounts on social.
Share of Voice covers volume and sentiment, indicating how much my brand is being discussed online. If compared to my competition, a lot of audience accounts are talking about my brand, then my brand owns a large share of online voice at that time. If not, many audience accounts are talking about my brand, then I have a low share of voice. Generally, most brands want to own a large share of voice, signaling greater awareness, engagement, conversions, and sales for themselves.
ROI covers referrals, conversions, and click-through rates (CTR) . Referrals track how a user lands on my website. Conversions track when someone purchases something from my site. A social conversion means they visited via a social media channel and then purchased something on that same visit. Finally, click-through rates (CTR) track how many audience accounts are interacting with my ads and posts.
Finally, Customer Care covers response rate & time. This tracks how fast my account is responding to messages and how many inquiries are getting a response. Generally, if I am running a public social media account, even if I am not selling a product over a store, I will still get inbound messages about my brand, and the level and quality of customer care I provide can either help or hurt my reputation. This metric tracks that performance and call tell me if I need to make adjustments here.
Most importantly, metrics provide me a quick, reviewable, and sharable means to check and see whether or not I am reaching my targeted goals. The only way to measure success or failure on social is through reviewing and understanding my social media metrics. Want more followers? Social media metrics can help me understand why my account does or does not pick up new followers. Want more engagement? Social media metrics can help me understand why my content does or does not receive engagement. Want more conversions? Again, social media metrics can help me understand why or why not I am are generating conversions.
Jenn Chen writing for sproutsocial puts it best: “Social media metrics are important because they prove you can measure how successful a campaign is, how well your social strategy is performing, and ultimately if you will have an impact on your overall business.”
Having discussed each primary metric and how they contribute towards specific goals on social, what metrics would I include in these three different types of reports: daily for myself, weekly for my immediate boss, and monthly for my company’s management team?
My daily report would focus on tracking and responding to engagement on social media and referrals. In order to build both community and authority, I want to strive for high engagement. That cannot exist without daily activity, that means putting out content daily and monitoring and responding to audience accounts engaging to that content. If I ignore this, my social media account will have an air of neglect around them and will be unable to attract significant engagement or build a healthy community around it. I want to track referrals on a daily basis to understand where my traffic is coming from. That information can help me either boost an underperforming referral channel (let us say direct referrals, for sake of argument) or supercharge a channel that is working well, say social.
My weekly report would focus on referrals, conversions, and customer care. While tracking referrals would already be part of my daily report, what is communicated to me in the daily report may or may not represent a real trend. That is why I would include referrals again for my weekly report, where I can see trends regarding inbound traffic better represented in my data. This weekly metric would give me a good indication of what channels are underperforming or super-performing on leads, allowing me to invest or support on channels as needed.
Secondly, my weekly reports would track overall CTR. This would provide me with insight on how much of my total ad budget is being spent per week, per channel and adjust as necessary to reach specified targets. Lastly, I would want to track the level and quality of customer care that is being provided by my social media account, checking on how long response times are on average, how many inbound inquiries are being addressed and the performance of any of my customer care specialists.
Lastly, my monthly report would take on a big picture view of the performance of my social media account. Here I would focus on how much share of voice my social media account has and measure whether or not it has increased or decreased. Based on the findings here, I can adjust my overall social media strategy (content, content type, content regularity, organic and paid advertising) to develop a stronger share of voice.
