Page 166 - Social Media Marketing

to your business. Always cite your own business objectives, your existing metrics, and
then build off of those to develop your specific set of key performance indicators and
related quantitative guideposts.

P Table 6.1 Examples of Primary Social Media Analytics

Measurement Sources Details and Notes

Traffic Leads Based on the sources of traffic arriving at Tie this to your current customers’

your site. behavior.

Membership Level The number of fans and followers, or How many of your fans are also follow-

subscribers if the content is offered as a ers? What percentage is active in more
free or for-pay subscription. than one channel?

Member Activity Number of members (registrants) versus What percentage of your membership

and actual unique visitors. base is visiting you with some regularity?

Conversions Google Analytics, Your conversion funnel. What share of your social traffic is actu-

ally completing the activities you have

144 defined?

c h a p t e r 6: SOCI A L A NA LY T ICS, M ET R ICS, A N D M EASU R EM EN T ■ Mentions Social Media Analytics, Tweetdeck, simi- How many people are talking about you?

lar counts. What are the trends over time?

Virality Send-to-Friend, cross-posts, Diggs, How much (or how little) is your content

similar. being spread?

Nick O’Neill’s “Social Times”

Writer and Industry Analyst Nick O’Neill publishes Social Times, a collection of reviews and
commentary on a variety of social media topics including the use of analytics. You can follow
Nick on Twitter (@allnick) and you’ll find the Social Times online site here:

http://www.socialtimes.com/about/

Setting your measurements into your business context is an obvious first step;
yet for the most part, businesses and organizations sometimes fail to formally recog-
nize and measure the impact of social media on business. Without such measurement,
it is a stretch to think that a social business program will ever take hold, let alone
thrive, inside a run-by-the-numbers business. Because most businesses and organiza-
tions are in fact run by the numbers, this does not bode well for an effective connection
between the Social Web and the inner workings of business, effectively relegating social
media to outbound marketing applications.

This is really unfortunate, as purely outbound marketing is probably the least
effective application of social media and social technology. Remember, the Social
Web—unlike TV and American Football, both essentially built for use as an advertising