Social Media

Social media metrics are a great way to see how your business’s social media campaigns are working. However, a quick glance at your number of retweets isn’t going to tell you much, is it?

A more thorough examination of your social media metrics will give you a better insight into how your business uses social media. By undertaking a deeper analysis of your social media metrics, you can uncover much more information.

Hootsuite have shared a number of ways in which you can undertake a more detailed examination of your social media performance by using more complex social media metrics. Some of these can be utilised in multiple social media sites, so there’s sure to be a way you can utilise many of their methodologies.

For example, Hootsuite advise that you shouldn’t just track comments, but also track the ‘conversation rate’. Many social media metrics examine how many comments are left on their pages, whether via Facebook, Twitter or other social media sites. This can give you an idea of how much customer interaction you get through your social media sites. But without much context the information doesn’t tell you much. For example, an average of 50 comments on your Facebook posts may sound good, but if you have 10,000 likes then it suddenly seems less impressive, doesn’t it?

The ‘conversation rate’ metric cited by Hootsuite was coined by the author and Google digital marketing expert, Avinash Kaushik, and works by examining your ratio of comments compared to your number of followers/page likes, giving you a more meaningful figure for analysis.

Similarly, by comparing and contrasting your results you can analyse your social media metrics much more thoroughly and find further useful information. To use another example from Hootsuite, they advise that you shouldn’t just track your mentions on social media, but also track your ‘social share of voice’.

This metric works by simply comparing your number of mentions with those of your competitors. It can show you many things, like your position in relation to your competition, and better present you with a picture of how your social media campaigns and presence is being received and viewed.

There are an abundance of social media metrics out there for you to utilise, from simple things like the number of clicks and hits you get, to more complex strategies. While these might be more time-consuming, they can tell you a lot more about how your business uses social media and if it’s being successful.

The 7 Social Media Metrics as outlined by Hootsuite are a great place to get started when examining your business’s social media presence.