1. Active network size
2. Amplification rate
3. Applause rate
4. Bookmarks
5. Channel views
6. Comments
7. Downloads / Installs
8. Email subscribes
9. Engagement
10. Fans
11. Favourites
12. Feed subscribes (RSS)
13. Followers
14. Following
15. Forwards
16. “Influence”
17. Klout score
18. Likes
19. Lists
20. Mentions
21. Reactions
22. Re-Tweets
23. Sentiment
24. Shares
25. Subscribes
26. Tags
27. Tweets
28. Tweet Reach
29. Tweet Velocity ( I like this one!)
30. Wall posts

There is a big problem here. Most of these metrics have little or no commercial meaning. What for example is the value of a “Like”? A like is no more than a mouse click on a web page. It requires no effort and takes a fraction of a second to perform.  A like requires no trade in information between the user and the item being liked. Anyone can do it and it signifies virtually nothing. Even the popular ‘email address for download’ exchange has limited value; I have downloaded a number of papers from companies it’s unlikely I’ll ever do business with – even though I am sufficiently interested in the content being provided to exchange my email address for it.

It’s ironic that whilst social media commentators and practitioners are busy churning out metrics with no real commercial meaning, traditional media is moving away from proxy data like coverage and frequency and into measuring and proving commercial behavioural change (fancy talk for sales) resulting from media activity.  It seems to me that social media evaluation has slipped into reverse gear and no none has noticed.  If social media is to advance its cause it needs to show either a direct or indirect link to more commercial measures like sales and customers. Is that possible? Well yes it is and it’s relatively straightforward.

All communication and media channels including digital media feed into sales funnels. Digital media traffic is the most measurable of these and can be tracked and measured in great detail from clicks to basket values.  This means it is possible to measure the commercial value of traffic generated by social media. If your Facebook page is generating traffic you can identify it in your inbound traffic logs. And if you can track the traffic through to sales baskets you can measure the sales generated by Facebook. And then you can start looking at your social media ROI numbers. If your Facebook page is referring 1,000 sales a month with a profit of £10 per sale, and costing only £1000 per month to manage and maintain, it’s making a valuable contribution to your business. If other hand it is producing 100 sales per month with £10 profit per sale and costs £10,000 per month to manage and maintain, then you are throwing money away.

The truth is that many social media variables only exist because of a strong supply side data push. Social media metrics are easy to produce; be they likes, friends, tweets, connections or channel subscribers they’re just descriptive data. At worst these metrics are a distraction for marketers. At best they are a rough proxy that needs to be calibrated with more meaningful commercial data. What marketers and business leaders want is sales, share, customers, customer value and profit. If social media sticks with likes, friends and subscribers sooner or later it will have to show what they mean.

The post Social Media Metrics Made Simple: Focus on Sales and Customers first appeared on Marketing IQ.

As a start point, everyone needs to recognise that social media is a media channel. It is not a marketing discipline. It is not a marketing objective. It is not a marketing strategy. So we might use the social media channel to raise brand awareness (objective) by targeting affluent new car buyers in social media (strategy), we might use social media to increase consideration (objective) by informing new car buyers about the unique benefits of the car we are selling (strategy) or we may use it to increase sales (objective) by communicating a last minute ‘walk-in’ trade-in deal (strategy). The metrics we use to measure social media should therefore relate directly to the objectives and strategies that we managing through the social media channel.

So, before we can measure social media we need to understand what we want social media to deliver from a marketing perspective. Only then can we select the right types of measurement and metrics to get the job done properly. Here are three examples of how we might measure social media activity against the delivery of three different marketing objectives:

1. Objective: Raise Awareness: There are a number of good tools for measuring online brand awareness, ad awareness, product awareness and salience. Ad Index from Dynamic Logic allows you to play ‘spot the attitude difference’ between web users who have been exposed to your messaging and those who have not. You can ask exposed and non-exposed groups bespoke questions about your brand and campaign activity which allows you to contrast and compare the differences between the two groups. Brand sentiment can be measured using sentiment trackers like Sentiment Metrics; through without bespoke surveys these may include a range of external references to your brand, not just your own social media activity.
2. Objective: New Customer Acquisition: If we want to use social media as a new customer acquisition tool then we should be using customer acquisition metrics. Microsoft’s Atlas can be used to track the online behaviour of your social media users across all touch points in the sales funnel. Bespoke tracking URLs in your social media pages can be used to identify visitors to your site originating in your social media pages. This type of tracking means you can ultimately relate customer value back to your social media activity.
3. Objective: Increase Retention / Loyalty: Here we can combine online tracking, data collection and customer data analysis to understand the contribution of social media. We can collect prospect and customer data in social media pages or in pages that link directly to social media. Fusing data collection with online tracking means we can find the data source of known named customers and measure their progress and value in the sales funnel and through cross sell and up-sell. The results from this type of activity may not be instant; customer value from market source can take a year or more to establish, but once it’s in place you will be able to see how social media is building sales revenue for your business.

The message is that we can’t measure social media for social media’s sake. We should always be measuring how social media performs against a given marketing objective. If we are clear about this, the techniques and metrics for measuring and evaluating social media ROI become much easier to identify, select and implement.

The post On a clear day: Measuring ROI in Social Media first appeared on Marketing IQ.