Social Media monitoring is all the rage these days and you need to track relevant metrics to gauge if your social media program and strategy is successful.

How you measure your Social Media ROI depends on your objectives when you entered the social media sphere. Was your strategy to increase your brand awareness, or to engage with customers or serve like a customer feedback  platform like Comcast. Depending on your focus, those are metrics you might be interested in measuring and tracking with time. Your unfiltered, brutally honest customer feedback has even been referred to Black Gold. So it is a must to monitor.

There are 3 main categories under which most social media metrics fit into:

1. Volume
2. Engagement
3. Conversion

Volume: The volume metric determines what is the reach and frequency of your brand or company.

• Twitter: Followers, Followers/Following ratio (TIP: If you have a new Twitter account, the ratio might be low as you will be following more than the number of followers, but gradually that should change to the reverse), # of Tweets

• Facebook: Total Fans, Unsubscribes (available on ‘old insights’), New Fans/Removed fans, Monthly active users; Media consumption: Photo views, Play and Audio views

• Blog: Impression, Click/ Visits, Blog subscribers,# of Page Views, New vs. Returning users, # of pages viewed per visit, Newsletter subscribers

• Youtube: Daily views

Engagement: Engagment metrics help you understand what is the affinity for your brand? And you can track over time what your levels of engagement has increased or decreased.
Metrics that help you gauge this are:

• Twitter: Retweets, Mentions, Sentiment Analysis (i.e. Positive or Negative Tweets), what times are your links most clicked on, Number of times your Brand is mentioned

• Facebook: Interactions, Likes, Wall posts, Comments, Post quality (available on ‘old insights’)

• Blog:  Blog comments,  average time spent, bounce rate (TIP: All these metrics are available free on Google Analytics. Your site needs to be setup correctly.)

• YouTube, Flickr: Audio or Photo views, user comments, telling friends, users uploading content

Conversion: Conversion metrics maybe the most important ROI metrics that most companies are interested in tracking as this tracks how many leads or sales you have had.
Some metrics in the conversion category are:

• Inquiries/Registrations
• Transactions
• CTR using bit.ly
• Leads generated
• Sales

So referring to the Engagement: Volume graph, you’re goal is to be in the top left box, trying to increase both the Engagement and Volume of your Social Media program over time.

Monitoring week-over-week or month-over-month is key. Being patient, consistent with your social media strategy and monitoring these metrics on a regular basis is a key component of your social media monitoring strategy. If there are any crucial metrics we have missed or any interesting new metrics out there, please do let us know.