Creating Qualitative Social Media Metrics

Lately, Social Media Marketing has become an integral part of most company advertising and PR strategies. It’s extreme effectiveness has seduced many marketers. Yet when trying to qualitatively measure their success they all fall short. Not because Social Media Marketing is any less powerful than advertised, but because trying to give a numerical rating to communications and relationships is difficult.

The need for qualitative measurements is growing, as clients expect numerical return on investments and marketers hope to gauge success. Although, creating a perfect success metric is nearly impossible due to the arbitrary and subjective basis of Social Media Marketing, I’ve outlined statistics to refer to when running a Social Media Campaign…

The first step to measuring success is defining it. Many of the following metrics will help you decide on a goal, and most will require that you have one.

Community

Social Media Marketing hinges on the foundation that a recommendation from a friend carries more weight than general advertising. With this fact in mind, it’s important to build friends or a community around your product or service.

The way we measure the community is by first creating a numerical size and then comparing it against our current community size. Facebook, Myspace, Ning, and Twitter are usually used to create friendships with customers.

To reach a numerical metric, divide the current friends present in these social networks by your goal.

Engagement

Once you’ve build a community, you can’t leave it be. You’ll have to continue to build your reputation and keep people’s attention. Without this, people will stop following what you say, and your community will start to dwindle.

If you have a blog or use Twitter to engage your customers, tracking this metric is simple. User engagement can be seen as your posts or tweets, over readers’ comments or replies.

Reputation

The final Social Media Metric is reputation. Are people following what you’re recommending?

You can create a qualitative figure for your reputation by taking total page impressions and dividing it by how many people followed the link being shown.

There are still other metrics which need to be observer, such as branding and PR effectiveness; but these are even more difficult to track. In the future someone might find a way to do it, but for the time being Social Media Marketers will have to make do with rough estimates.

Do you use any other metrics for your social media campaigns? How do you track its effectiveness?

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Brian October 3, 2008 at 7:29 pm: Interested article, this is definitely a hot topic. Not sure I follow your statistics though. Let’s say I have 25 impressions on a blog post in a day and only 6 people click through a link = 4.2. What exactly does this mean, what is a high grade, something closer to 0? Or perhaps this is just a benchmark?
Samir Balwani October 5, 2008 at 11:47 am: I was thinking it was more a benchmark Brian. Now you have an idea of where you want to go; but yes in your example closer to 0 would be better.
Jo Porritt September 29, 2009 at 4:40 am: Samir, this is useful – selling social media services, especially in B2B markets and financial services, sometimes demands that as a supplier I have to demonstrate ROI. The current climate, plus the fear surrounded by new social media adopters means they need the comforting blanket of “this works” before they dip their toes in the water…any metrics or analytics that can be applied to this go a long way in closing the deal :) and a lot of talking sometimes!
Adalia John October 5, 2009 at 7:37 pm: I thank you for the information. I am a “nubie” and I will be implementing all the wonderful suggestions from your post “the five simple things most Social Media marketers forget to do.”