3 Social Media Metrics Types to Measure Performance of Social Media Campaigns

This article is guest posted by David Smith.

Things that can’t be measured can never be improved. Just imagine – Improving your ppc campaigns without any way to track performance of your ads or improving conversion rate of a website without any way to identify the poor performing sections of the checkout process? The same rule applies to social media marketing. You can’t improve the performance of your social media campaign unless you measure its results. In this article we will cover different types of social media metrics available and how you can use them to measure the performance of various aspects of your social media campaign.

1. Quantitative /Volume Metrics

The numbers of followers and fans you gain, how many times your links get re-tweeted and shared on facebook, the amount of traffic social media sites are sending to you. If you are a blog, then can you see the increase in the number of comments or subscribers to your blog, all these things come under the category of Quantitative metrics.  Quantitative metrics helps you to find out how successful you were in reaching your target audience.

2. Qualitative / Engagement Metrics

Once you’ve reached to your target audience, you need to find out what they are talking about you and your company. If your campaign was to create awareness about your upcoming product then what was the reaction of your audience. If your campaign was to bust some negative myths about your company then how successful you was in it. How people describe your products in their social networks. All these things need to be measured by Qualitative Metrics. Various free social media tools like – Social Mention a real time social media search engine which also helps in determining the overall sentiment ( positive, negative, neutral) of social media users for your brands and paid tools like SocialRadar, Radian6 are available that you can use.

Though, no tool can analyze human emotions and engagement with 100% accuracy but still these tools definitely give you a picture about the amount of engagement or buzz you had created by your social media campaign.   Qualitative metrics helps you to find out the number of your followers or fans who had really shown some interest in your campaign by participating in any kind of engagement.

3. Actionable/ROI Metrics

Almost all social media campaigns just boils down to one thing – the ROI you get from it. Every campaign has a purpose, a call to action. It could be anything – buying a product, to generate new leads, to attract new customers, to increase sales from old customers etc. Actionable metrics helps you to find out the number of people who took the action you want them to take and help you to keep track of the progress you had made in achieving your goal. The actionable metrics vary from campaign to campaign and are determined by the objective of the campaign.

These are the three main Social media metrics types you can use in almost every social media campaign to measure its performance. Which metrics you should use and to what extent they should be used depends on the goal of your social media campaign. For e.g. – If your goal is only to increase the number of followers on your twitter account then you won’t be needing any tools to measure the level of engagement and conversation taking place. Similarly, if the goal of your campaign is just to increase brand awareness then you won’t require any actionable metrics because you don’t want your users to take any action.

These metrics can also provide you with insights that will further help you to analyze your audience and products in a better way. For e.g. – if you can see the increase in number of followers but not in the amount of engagement, then it clearly gives a signal that either the methods you are using to gain new followers (like you follow me, I follow you) is not correct or there is nothing talkworthy about your products. Similarly, if very few people are taking the desired action despite of participating in conversations, then it means something is wrong in the overall conversion process or your audience is not convinced by your products.

What are your opinions on measuring the performance of social media campaign and what metrics you use? Share them with us in comments below.

David Smith works for Conversion Optimization Company Invesp and enjoys writing on SEO, landing pages , conversion rate optimization and affiliate marketing.