Social media data about followers, likes, comments and shares are often overlooked as “blank” metrics – meaningless numbers to avoid when trying to prove the value of social activity.
At the same time, these metrics are the currency of social media. As the person responsible for your organization’s social media presence, these metrics are critical indicators of whether your hard work is paying off.
And herein lies the debate. For some, the number of likes on a post is meaningless. It means everything to others.
Are all social metrics “blank” metrics by default? No. But how you use them changes everything. Let’s examine why these metrics are important and how to avoid using them unnecessarily.
Why are these social metrics important?
Without followers, you have no followers. And without a fixed level of engagement, many social networks’ algorithms start working against you, making it harder for your social content to even reach that target audience. These metrics literally keep social media up and running.
Followers, shares, likes and comments also represent an invaluable piece of information for any business: whether people care about what you say.
When someone follows you, they allow your brand to take up space in their carefully selected social feeds. Likewise, when they share a post, it means they find it so valuable that they are willing to add their own personal branding to it when forwarding it. These metrics indicate that your brand is connecting one-on-one with people on a public forum; this is an opportunity that only social media can offer.
These metrics also allow you to quickly fine-tune your social strategy based on real-time performance. They can tell you what type of content resonates, how you stack up against your competitors, and where you should invest more resources.
When do social metrics turn into vanity metrics?
Social metrics turn into “blank” metrics when you use social activity to use your own horn rather than tie it back to real business goals.
Just because followers, likes, comments, retweets, and shares are important to you as a social marketer, that doesn’t make them inherently valuable to the rest of your organization. Your CEO doesn’t care that you have 50 new followers, they look to see if social media is visibly helping them achieve their goals.
The most common reason these metrics are labeled as “blank” metrics is because social marketers report them separately. It’s important to regularly track your follower growth and engagement, but the reports you share with the rest of your organization need to tell a bigger story.
How can you make social metrics important to everyone in your organization?
Link them to business goals
As outlined in our social ROI guide, your social media goals should align with real business goals. Here are a few examples:
- Business transformations: Our goal is to provide high quality leads to our sales team through social media.
- Brand awareness: Our aim is to increase awareness of our new product before it is released and to distract attention from our competitors.
- Customer experience: Our goal is to turn our customers into loyal brand advocates by improving customer service.
Here’s how “gap” metrics can be used to measure whether you’re meeting these goals:
Aim: Business transformations
Social metric: Link clicks
Rather than just tracking the number of clicks on your posts on social media, track the behavior of these visitors when they land on your website and participate in a contest or a newsletter.
To do this, set the URL parameters and use a web analytics program like Google Analytics or Omniture to calculate how much of the social-referred traffic is converted into leads.
Aim: Brand awareness
Social metric: Mentions
Almost any social metric can help you measure brand awareness, but the most effective way to measure it is to use mentions to calculate your social voice share (SSoV). When tracked over time, this can show whether there is an increase in brand awareness before and after a major event such as the launch of a new product.
The easiest way to do this is to calculate all the mentions of your brand on social media and the mentions of your competitors and add these numbers to get the total number of industry mentions. (Instead of doing this manually, use a tool like Moyens I/O Analytics to calculate these numbers for a given time in just a few clicks.)
Next, divide the promises your brand receives by the total number and multiply by 100 to get your SSoV represented as a percentage.
Aim: customer experience
Social metric: Comments and answers
Simply keep track of the number of comments or replies you receive to a post.
it doesn’t say anything of value to the rest of your organization. what is this you made with these comments.
Tracking your initial response time (FiRT) to any customer service requesting comment or response will help you measure how quickly your customers respond to their messages on social media. You can also use this metric to determine if there is room for improvement in your organization. For example, you can determine if your day team solves problems faster than your night team.
You can set up a “First Response” template in Moyens I/O Analytics and automatically measure your response time by team, message type, team member, social network, or tag. Check out our first book on using team metrics to learn more.
Use them to spend smarter on social ads
Use metrics like likes, comments, and shares as indicators of where (and how) you should spend your social ad budget. There are two ways to take advantage of these metrics:
1. Increase high-performing organic posts
Likes, comments, retweets, and shares indicate that the content resonates with your audience. Leverage this momentum by increasing these posts and you’ll be able to further expand the reach of this content without breaking the bank.
Since these posts are already getting engagement, they have an element of social proof, they can entice more people to like, click, comment and share.
2. Make data-driven decisions for your next ad campaign
These metrics can also help you stay informed about your future ad spend. Create campaigns that mimic your top-performing organic posts or run a campaign that retargets people who have previously engaged with your content.
How to submit a social media report to your boss
As outlined in our article on proving the value of social media to executives, here are three key points to keep in mind when presenting social media metrics:
- Keep it short: Presentations should not exceed 30 minutes and should not be more than once a month. Cut out everything that is not necessary.
- Always demonstrate business value: Different metrics are important to different teams. Responsible people want top business results that are knowledgeable about the tactics you use to achieve them.
- Use images: Using images and data visualization, separate pieces of information and show key statistics.
Use Moyens I/O Impact and get plain-language reports on your social data to see exactly what is driving results for your business and where you can increase your social media ROI.
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