How to Get More Out of Your Social Media Metrics
At the companies where I’ve run social media programs, I’ve always had a monthly analytics ritual. Going straight to the source, I would download raw data from as many social platforms as I could. For every other platform — I’m looking at you, LinkedIn, and your sad lack of data exports — I would manually gather daily numbers of shares and impressions. Then I would corral all these numbers into a massive Excel workbook and go to town creating graphs and formatted tables. It’s true, there are plenty of tools out there that can do compile this data for you, but I’ve always liked to know exactly what kind of raw data I was dealing with to do my own calculations.
Spreadsheets bring me joy. With spreadsheets, you can rein in the chaos of social media metrics through rows and columns, and up the ante by applying formulas that spit out even more rows and columns.
The first time I sent out one of these reports, I got an email back from my boss.
“When you send me your reports, make sure to give me a piece of your brain too,” she wrote.
The issue, of course, was that raw numbers alone weren’t enough because I had neglected to include any analysis in my analytics report. While graphs and tables can show trends over time, the real value of social media analytics is in interpreting those trends.
Monitoring Social Community Health
The holy grail of social media metrics is the return on investment for social marketing, also known as Social ROI. Not all companies are set up to measure this. Instead, you often end up measuring around this marker of success, with:
- engagement rates
- follower growth rates
- click-through rates
- impression rates
…and often more granular metrics that look at individual campaigns, posts and influencers. From these metrics, you can infer a lot, including:
- how much and how fast your social communities are growing
- the effectiveness of your CTAs (calls to action)
- how far your message is spreading
- which posts are getting the most attention
- how often your follower base is actively engaging with your content
These metrics are important to monitor the overall health of your social communities. Are you growing? Good. Are people seeing your posts? Great. And are they sharing them too? Even better.
What these metrics won’t give you is context, and this kind of reporting is ultimately limiting because it can’t be used to inform nonsocial marketing programs, answer business questions, or drive business strategy.
Put It In Context to Go Beyond the Basics
The next level of social metrics takes the trends you’ve spotted through your social metrics health checks, and asks you to dig into the cause and effects.
For example, your posts may be getting hit with a ton of comments, but you’ll need to apply sentiment analysis to see whether these comments are beneficial to your brand, or whether people are on your page to complain. Then there’s also the issue of verifying how many of your followers are actual human beings and not bots.
The demographics of your social community is also important. The reach on your posts may be excellent, but how do you know they’re actually reaching your target audience? Some platforms, like Facebook, offer fairly detailed demographic data, which can help you make this assessment. But for those platforms that don’t, you’ll need to do the digging yourself or find tools that can fill in the blanks. If you have a large follower base on Instagram but you’re still not reaching the right audience, it might be time to take a second look at your content strategy.
Looking at engagement, do you have a large group of followers who are moderately engaged with your content, or a small group of dedicated advocates who account for the majority of your shares, comments and likes? And are these advocates customers or company employees? If your most engaged followers happen to be employees at your company, then consider starting an internal influencer program.
Don’t Forget About Qualitative Data
Context matters because, ultimately, your social media metrics should be able to inform the decisions you make about future campaigns, social ad spends, and resource gaps.
I mentioned sentiment analysis before as one way of interpreting comments and conversations on your accounts. But qualitative data — i.e. unstructured data left by your customers online—can also be a valuable source of unbiased business insights. Look beyond the positive, negative and neutral categories to read what people are actually saying about your brand and take notes. Are there certain product features that get requested regularly? Listen for common pain points to identify systemic issues.
What metrics do you measure? I’d love to hear about your love (or loathing) for spreadsheets.
