Social Media Metrics – How, What, and Why?

This week we will be blogging as part of a three-part series on social media; SMPS National posted a great article on their Twitter handle (@SMPSNational) on the top 9 key performance indicators for judging your company’s social media performance. Once you start a Facebook Group, how can you tell if it is really helping your brand? We at SMPS Chicago love our marketing metrics, so there are a few metric driven suggestions on this list. And on the heels of last week’s awesome from “Bland to Brand” Professional Development program with Pepper Marketing, this information is the “part two” in what Tim Padgett discussed. Below are the 5 key social media performance indicators we felt were most beneficial from the 9 posted along with our own personal suggestions/sites/how-to’s on putting the indicator to work.

1) Share of Voice: The number of mentions of your brand versus competing brands on the social web; I personally recommend exploring a free (yay free!) social media monitoring services that will help you compile data, as mentioned, we love our metrics, and that is the best way to help with buy-in to back-up your social media case – www.socialmention.com is a solid free service

2) Brand Volume: The total number of brand mentions over a given period of time; socialmention.com will help you will assist with this, start a basic CRM in Excel and include these brand mentions over a daily, weekly, and monthly system. Set-up your company Google Alerts here: www.google.com/alerts and add new project names, clients, employees as that is all part of your brand umbrella.

3) Engagement: The overall number of times a user talks to your brand on social sites; a post, a tweet, a LinkedIn discussion – those are all great engagement catalysts, but if no one is responding or participating – what is the point? Include a worksheet in your “Social Media Metrics” spreadsheet that shows how many comments, likes, responses, retweets, etc are being posted and what the topic was. These numbers are a bit easier to calculate as you will receive alerts when new comments are posted/can tally all responses. Take it to the next level and dissect the content and timing of posts: What time of day was the post and what time(s) of day received the most engagement? Was the post about a client, a new project, an industry charity event, etc?

4) QR code metrics: For our advanced students who are already creating, disseminating, and utilizing QR codes, once the QR code is out there, how do you know how well it is performing? Google Analytics is the best streamlined and free approach I have found, check out this step-by-step guide on how to perform a QR analysis with Google Analytics

Happy social media-ing:) #funwithsocialmediametrics
Megen Briars, mbriars@okwarchitects.com

Portions of this post were taken from the online article, "9 Ways to Measure Your Brand's Social Media Health," written by Jacqueline Zenn, 2012 June 11, www.mashable.com/2012/06/11/social-media-brand-data/