MEASURING YOUR SOCIAL
MEDIA PROGRESS
There are some interesting
and useful metrics which you will want to use to measure the success
(or incremental progress at intervals) of each of the individual
social media items in your social media mix. You'll find these simple
guidelines indispensable – especially if you monitor them at
consistent intervals with genuine vigilance.
And while these are not
actually a means of measuring your actual return on dollars or time
invested in social media, they are wonderfully basic and easily
calculable rules of thumb to inform you as to how each of your social
media tools is performing, and what the whether or not the associated
performance trend is improving.
An example of this type of
measurement is the number of “likes” that you have on your
Facebook company page; while nobody can consclusively assign a dollar
value to each “like”, it is commonly understood that the more
“likes” that you have, the more probable it is that you are
engaging your audience, and that that audience may contain some
future customers or clients.
While the metrics used in
this article are not directly dollar-equated, they will provide you
with an indication of how well your campaign to engage an audience
(and some possible prospective clients or customers) is going. These
are “quick and dirty” tests and are not totally scientific –
there's been no correlative study. This material is all anecdotal,
and your Social Media Guru might even find some of this material
objectionable. You've been warned.
The social media selected
for this article include Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Plus
(G+) and business blogging. While this last item is far too often
excluded from the general categorization of social media, it is
actually critical in a demographic environment where “content is
king.”
Other social media such as
Pinterest, Instagram, Digg, Reddit, Foursquare, and a host of others
are not covered because we're still experimenting with their metrics.
We've also excluded such video media as YouTube, Vimeo, and others
because of the already-extensive measurement information coverage
available on the Internet.
=> Twitter:
The ratio of Followers to
Following should be increasing. If this ratio is less than 1, you'll
look like a beginner. The higher this ratio, the more of an
influencer you will appear to be – and in dealing with social
media, appearances are important in terms of harnessing the
undisputed driving power of the herd mentality.
The ratio of your Tweets to
the number of Followers should be decreasing, which indicates a
higher and increasing level of engagement and influence
(theoretically – these ratios are all theoretical), unless
you are extraordinarily chatty or have a significant flow of RSS
material from third-party sources being pumped into your
twitterstream via Twitterfeed or some similar application, in which
case this ratio would be falsely negatively affected.
=> Facebook:
The number of likes on your
company or brand page should be increasing weekly. If your total page
likes do not exceed 1,000, you'll look like a beginner. More page
likes indicate the acceptance and recognition of your brand, and/or
of the content that you place on your page. Try your best to provide
some interesting or insightful content on the site daily. The more
frequently that you post, the more likely it is that your page will
acquire additional likes.
Also, as with Twitter, a
greater amount of likes is more apt to generate new additional likes
due to the herd mentality of many viewers. If a substantial number of
the likes are originated through your company's blog, website or
newsletter, the more potent those three sources are in terms of
audience engagement.
The ratio of likes
originated from non-Facebook sources to Facebook-originated sources
should be increasing over time, indicating that your other branding
campaigns are working well.
Getting positive page
reviews and status update likes are generally indicative of the
potency of your page and its flow of content, more than of your
branding, per se.
=> LinkedIn:
Followers on your LinkedIn
company page are similar to “likes” on your Facebook company or
brand page, except that they are generally more difficult to get. As
with Facebook, the ratio of followers originated from non-LinkedIn
source to LinkedIn sources should be increasing over time, indicating
that your other branding campaigns are working well.
Since LinkedIn is more of a
business-to-business and professional-to-business platform than
Facebook, which is far more consumer-involved and consumer-engaging,
acquiring additional followers generally speaks more to how your
company is being perceived as a professional or business thought
leader or influencer than as an endorsement of or engagement with
your brand.
In very general terms, if
you have in excess of several hundred followers on your LinkedIn
company page, you're looking good. It is much more of a challenge to
obtain LinkedIn followers than it is to get Facebook page likes,
positive reviews or status update likes. By the way, “status
updates” are the same as posts.
=> Google Plus (G+):
Google Plus is arguably one
of the most potent SEO media, and it is powerful way to refer viewers
or followers to your website, blog, and other social media. Google
Plus is akin to some combination of Facebook, Twitter and a blog
posting platform, all rolled up into one. Your company can use Google
Plus as a means of achieving brand acceptance and name recognition,
as well as in garnering influencer and thought leader status from the
business and professional communities. It is an excellent social
media tool precisely because it lends itself to so much
multi-purposing. Don't underestimate it and don't underutilize G+.
The variables to be looked
at are “acquaintances”, “Followers” and “views”.
Acquaintances will also be deemed to include, “friends”, “family”
and any other category of person whom you can add to your list by
your own action. At present, the maximum number of these unilaterally
gathered parties permitted by Google totals 5,000.[If you don't
believe me, just try to add some new acquaintances afterr you've hit
the permitted maximum and Google will send you a cold reminder that
you cannot add any additional persons to your circles 'at this
time']. There are no limits to the number of followers which you may
accumulate and the number of views (of your G+ profile page).
The first raio to be looked
at is the number of Followers to the number of acquaintances, which
should be rising. Once this ratio exceeds 1.0, and provided that the
number of your followers exceeds 5,000, you are on your way. Once the
number of your followers exceeds 10,000, you will become noticed, and
the (now infamous) gravity pull of the herd mentality will bring you
even more followers and even more views with less effort. If your
posts to G+ are laden with links to your other social media, it will
be feeding those other media with new likes, views, members,
followers and so forth, as well. You'll find that your G+ results
appear very early on in your Google search results, and that your
other social media postings will be gaining prominence if you've been
building them through the use of hyperlinks in you G+ posts.
The second ratio to be
evaluated periodically is the number of views to the number of your Followers. While it is difficult to give you a benchmark objective on
how this ratio should be rising and what it should ideally be, if
you've exceeded one million profile views and you've gotten 10,000 Followers your G+ campaign is getting noticed. It should be noted
that one million profile views if regarded (anecdotally) as a good
benchmark to indicate that your post to G+ are carrying a good deal
of influence. Having said all of this, a ratio of 100 views per Follower (on average) is an excellent target to meet and to exceed.
=> Business Blog:
Your blog's success (in
terms of readership) is a major measure of your influencer and
thought leadership status. It is also obviously a measure of the
quality and magnetism of your content. You should be looking at
posting one new article per week (or more if posible) to keep your
blog “fresh” and have it frequently viewed by the spiders, robots
and other cyberspace creatures that constantly search for an review
new content.
The variables to be looked
at are simply the number of posts and the number of views. As your
number of posts (cumulatively) is growing, average number of views
per post should be growing (for the blog as a whole), and the number
of views per post (individually) should generally be tending upward
as well, although you may expect some fluctation depending upon the
strength of the individual post – and the strength and virality of
posts will vary depending upon a wide variety of factors, from the
number of illustrations (images) embedded into your posts, to the
title of any given post. An exciting title can do wonders for the
traction of a single post.
In Summary:
Monitoring each of the
social media tools in your social media mix will tell you if you are
heading in the right direction for improved status in terms of
branding, name recognition, being an influencer and being a thought
leader. I would strongly advise that you run a quick set of
diagnostic ratio and growth tests on your social media weekly to be
able to intelligently assess whether or not you are making progress.
Tags, Labels, Keywords, Categories And Search Terms For This Article:
social media, metrics, media mix, branding, influence, Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, LinkedIn, blogging, measuring, Douglas E Castle, GEI Consulting, business, marketing, success, analytics, views, Followers
Thank you, as always, for
reading me.
Douglas E
Castle
Please Join Me
On LinkedIn
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