Social Media is said to be the strongest platform when branding or internet advertising is the prime concern. It’s an incredibly handsome and convenient tool for digital business. By perfectly tracking the social metrics or stats about your company, products, industry’s, even competition and many more can offer vital insights regarding your position, your company’s progress within the industry and the potency of your policies and artifices. This guide to social media marketing metrics will help every online marketer on how to make a new start with this effective business strategy, especially the beginner.

Definitive Guideline of Social Media Metrics

For the last couple of years, internet business is experiencing delightful progress due to extensive user’s engagement in social media. The following guide to social media marketing metrics won’t disappoint you on that aspect since it’s filled with instructions like how can you track social analytics and break them, how to measure them adequately and most of all, derive you in a way so that you don’t pass over any decisive insights ever.

Let’s get started with this guideline. Hope you guys would like it and go through it wholeheartedly to know something new.

1.Volume of Mentions

Tracking “Mentions” is said to be the first key metric of social media marketing that consequently offers higher conversion rate. The more your mention volume gets bigger, the better you’d notice greater conversion rate from social media to your business website.

Based on your role of work, you ought to track those ”Mentions” for several different key phrases likewise your brand name, industry, product or service, company, the competition or any selective market term. It will provide a full outline of the social conversions, which is of course your very first preference.

More simplistically, “Mentions” are just the quantity of times the phrase or the term or the word used in social media you’re chasing wholeheartedly. It’d let you to apprehend how well or how bad the term/subject has been able to attract audience and their reaction as well.

Now, we’ll see how can you measure it and use them identically.

Measure it!! How???

Overall “Mention Volume” is an easy-peasy metric which is all about counting or calculating. You can invest on several tools that will automatically trace the number of specific search term mentioned in several places for you. Moreover, you can count the wall posts, tweets, pins and many more.

How to Implement that Strategy?

Engage at the right time. Find if there is perfect period like certain days or weeks when mention increases rapidly.

Schedule your content thoroughly to catch the proper attention from active potential audience.

Make your customer service online and keep them prepared to engage with prospects.

React to mention as soon as possible.

Investigate PR (Public Relation) regularly to find spike in brand mentions that might provide a positive signal to brand and you should amplify, or negative impacts that need to be prevented to avoid potential crisis.

Full marketing team has to own proper understating about the surge in market and assess they should behave according to that.

Never fear of implementing necessary tools like Social Mention, Hootsuite to find mention volume in regular basis with a detail report.

Team marketing must remain prepared to proceed in competitive positioning.

Initiate campaign with corresponding term or keyword and track mentions to observe whether it’s going well or not. Monitor the campaign and mentions very closely. To be honest, using tools would be perfect to do so in social media marketing. So that you can make some necessary change in case of not seeing any further reaction.

Do it with a solid plan like tracking the mention monthly or weekly or daily. Measure them and keep them on the chart to experience growth at times.

Monitoring mention got far easier since Facebook and Twitter both started using HASHTAGS (#). In making to that, now we can find any trendy phrase or keyword mentioned anywhere in social media within a minute and count them.

2. Sentiment/Emotional Attachment

Sentiment is the emotional attachment behind any social media mention. It’s actually the top-notch approach of measuring the theme of any conversation like if the person is delighted, or angry, or annoyed. This summates a vital ambience to conversions across social media pages. Without “Sentiment”, “Mentions” could be puzzling and useless.

Suppose you’re computing mentions for the newly released product by company. By observing sheer surge in mentions, you might accept this as a well-received campaign. What if all the mentions were meant to put negative aftermath? For what measuring sentiment is one of the most crucial social media metrics.

The whole calculating process will assist you to grasp overall audiences feeling regarding any particular subject or product and allow you to make any alteration likely to social conversation that would actually matter to you and your company.

Measure it!! How?

 

I’m not going to make any fool of you. Computing sentiment can quite be a time consuming based on the volume of discussion, of course if you want to do it on your own. Just imagine, to record sentiment and understand tone of mentions, you ought to go through each comment, read them, assess the tone and after all of them, assign score like negative/positive/neutral. Quite an impossible job, isn’t it?

A few free and paid tools are available to do both tracking and measuring emotional attachment. Those tools are able to provide a complete report of sentiment analysis.

Among all the tracking platforms, the UberVU via Hootsuite uses the most compelling automation tool to regulate sentiment depending on machine learning technology.

For example, if a person tweets regarding their experience like shopping at Galleria, the tool would determine the sentiment according to the words they used in the description.

How to Implement that Strategy?

 a. Crisis Management

A sudden prick of negative mentions is the indicator of evolving crisis management system. Go through the PR department, dig deep through the negative mentions, find the reasons and then establish a solid plan to handle such situation. That’s why, analyze audience sentiment thoroughly.

 b.Competitive Research

The whole process of sentiment analysis is able to find how remarkably your product is being distinguished comparing to the competitors.

Keep your eyes open to understand the level of emotional attachment of competitors and seek opportunities including positive and negative in order to make the best use of them.

 c. Asses Campaign

Looking forward to compute the success margin of any marketing campaign, product launches or any other new enterprise? Use sentiment level thoroughly.

Use the Sentiment level to see and evaluate your brand value.

Most of all, monitor how the levels change during the time of initiative to establish whether it’s received with positive or negative attitude.

3. Reach / Exposure

Reach or Exposure means the number of potential audience connected with your social media. It’s like the total count of Facebook ID followers, Facebook page likes, Twitter followers, LinkedIn or Pinterest followers and so on. If your Twitter account has 600 followers, then each of your tweets can possibly reach 1,000 people. Or if your Pinterest board has 1,000 followers, then each of pin will spread to 1000 people.

Exposure might seem the number of followers you have only, however, it’s apparently the number of followers each of your follower has. Suppose you or your company has 10,000 followers in twitter. If your latest tweet gets retweeted by a twitter user with 15,000 followers, then the exposure of that tweet shall be including the amount of impression depending on your 10,000 followers plus the specific user’s 15,000 followers and their impression. Of course we cannot expect every time in this way, since exposure always measures the potential audience.

Measure it!! How?

You can organize your follower’s number of each social web page in a tally like number of Facebook page likes, LinkedIn connections. Twitter followers, Pinterest followers and more. Either you can keep tracing that statistic manually, use subtle analytical report offered by each social media or invest on analytics tool which can self-willingly capable of tracking exposure.

To be very frank, measuring exposure manually is quite a daunting task especially when you’re thriving for tracing impressions of a certain market term or any particular campaign. Handy social media management tool is probably the best option here to track proper exposure. Or you can do the tally thing and keep measuring the number of impressions for each posted content.

How to implement that formula?

Trace exposure on each social platform to discover where you’re perceiving solid growth.

Utilize exposure to calculate expansion of any conversation to measure success.

Research thoroughly to determine which type of sentimental mention is perfect for content creation and future campaign.

To understand more about impact, merge the reach and exposure with engagement metrics.

Keep the PR department occupied in case of any misleading incident.

For example, Facebook provides their page owner a facility named as “the number of people who saw your post”. The network counts the number whenever the post appears before any person’s news feed.

There’re two types of “reach” count that Facebook provide.

Post Reach

Number of people saw any apost, which can paid or organic.

Total Reach

If any visitor visits the page, see the activities, observe the posts, check-ins, mentions and ads.

4. Engagement

 

Reach and Engagement are head to head according to social media aspect. Engagement actually measures how often or how much others or audiences interact with your post in social media.

What is the proper meaning of Engagement?

While someone spends time and tends to comment, like or favorite your post, they’re meanly getting interacted or engaged with your content. Engagement metric is easiest to understand and visible to everybody in some point.

Now how can we forget about Share, Retweet, Reblog, and Repin? All of those metrics are apparently the subset of engagement metrics. They let your content to be seen by more people and increase the engagement number as well as exposure. Though engagement metric is essential for highlighting the content success, but in some point, sharing metric is much more important and they can reach beyond your expectation.

Measure Engagement!!!

Needless to mention that each social media site is different from one another. So each engagement will be measured separately. Let’s go through their engagement points in following:

Facebook

• Page Likes
• Engagement Rate
• People Engagement
• Likes
• Shares
• Comment

Twitter

• Replies
• Tweets
• Modified Tweets
• Favorites

Pinterest

• Repins
• Likes
• Comments

LinkedIn

• Comments
• Likes
• Interactions
• Engagement Rates

Google+

• Shares
• +1s
• Comments
• Total Engagements

Instagram

• Likes
• Comments

Tumblr

• Reblogs
• Likes

Vine

• Revines
• Likes
• Comments

How to implement it?

Make a proper guideline of your whole content strategy

Utilize Engagement report to understand the type of contents or posts that get attention or not and create future content,

Go through the above listing and pay solid attention to age, location and gender of the people get engaged. Facebook tends to provide insights about those age group and location, so that you can investigate manually.

If your major engagement comes from outside of your targeted audience, it’s time to make some changes.

Read people’s feedback and take action as necessary

Measure any campaigns or contents or opinions success by the engagement rate overtime.

Value your loyal customer and maintain a solid relationship with them for the sake of your social business development.

5. Share of Voice

 

Share of Voice is an opinion based one of the most pivotal and mathematical social media marketing metrics. This metric will facilitate you to recognize how your product or brand is performing in this competitive digital business world. Share of Voice offers a brief discussion including the mention percentage of your company along with your competitor’s percentage as well.

Measure this Metric!!

To compute the Share of Voice, you ought to tally all your brand’s mention for a certain time tableat first. Now assemble the mentions of your other competitors in the industry within the same time. The method to measure this metric will be:

Share of voice= Number of your mentions/ Total number of mentions for competitive companies

How to Implement this Metric?

Don’t just measure this metric for some specific brand mentions.

Do research abut competitor. Measure Share of Voice for a top class rival to estimate its market share.

Compute potency of campaign and other attempts. Before starting a campaign, don’t forget to measure you Share of Voice in order to calculate any increase.

The calculating formula is quite simple and for multiple campaign at a time, it’s better to use tools for making better result.

 6. Growth Rate of Audience/Follower

 

The change of audiences or followers number in any corresponding brands or particular company’s social networking pagerefers to Audience Growth Rate. By tracking that metric, we can comprehend an average rate of decrease or increase value of your fans-follower on individual networking site over time.

How to Measure It?

To measure this metric, first of all, calculate the overall number of followers on each social media. Compute the increase or decrease in those number by a day/week/month and specify them in another time table to recognize how speedily you’re gaining new fan-followers.

How to Use this Metric?

Do some research about which social network is generating highest growth concurrently and how can you apply them.

Don’t forget to evaluate success rate during the social media marketing campaign.

Keep close look on age, gender and location of your new audience.

Measure the growing rate of the big competitors at first, then start calculating the growth rate of follower and always do that in same approach.

7.Influence Rate

Social media marketing is all about making crucial interactions with audience, which is also called followers influence. This metric is hard to determine manually for what several efficient tools like Kred, Peerlndex and Klout are available now. Those tools will count the influence rate of your ongoing social campaign.

Nevertheless, apart from tools, each company tend to implement its own terminology of measuring influence by going through the overall number of likes, comments, shares and reach of a particular kind of posts.

You can do it on your own also by the way. Measuring influence rate might be sort of a tricky job. Remember, having a large number of followers or audience doesn’t indicate higher influence rate. Influence is apparently all about making people inspired to take some action like liking, commenting, sharing, retweeting, repining and many more. This is why this sole metric is very important for determining engagement in larger aspect.

Key to Determine this Metric

Twitter:

1. Retweets
2. Replies
3. Favorite

Facebook:

1. Comments
2. Likes
3. Shares

Google+:

1. +1s
2. Shares
3. Comments

Pinterest:

1. Likes
2. Comments
3. Repins

LinkedIn:

1. Likes
2. Comments
3. Interactions
4. Recommendations

How Can You Use that?

First of all, recognize who is gossiping about your product or company and their experience. Reach them out and influence them to engage more as much as you can.

Seek out the potential influencers from the targeted audience to promote your brand.

Influence them to endorse your service and spread your product name.

By going through the whole influence rate, measure how much your reach and engagement level have increased.

Whenever you’re about introduce a brand new product or campaign, do arrive with a brand new strategic idea. And assure that your audience love to interact through your activities in social media.

Now, we’ll look over the tools you can use to measure your social media marketing metrics.

Which Tools to Use?

There are number of effective tools which can be superbly collaborated to make the best use of metrics all across the social media. Let’s check them out and decide which will be best to invest according to your business plan.

 

 1. Social Mention

Well, this one is by far one of the best tools for measuring mention volume. Social Mention offers a magnificent way to learn about brand interactions and mentions all over the web and specially in social media with a straightforward format.

You just have to type your targeted term or phase in the search field and hit search. Don’t forget to select media(s) (All/Blogs/Microblogs/Bookmarks)before clicking. It’ll show all the mentions of that term across the whole web along with:

Brand’s Strength or how much it’s being disputed

The passion or how likely people tend to redo that mention

The positive or negative sentiment

Measure of influence or Reach

You’ll have to be equipped with current users demand, top available keywords, hashtags and other potential source as well. And in order to stay in the loop, don’t forget to get an RSS feed of your mentions.

Social Mention is a completely FREE of cost online service.

 

2. Mention

Though we discussed about mention volume method, but there is also a sole tool available with a name tag “Mention”. Mention is known to be the brand new tool that took over Google Alerts. It’s a sterling program that can show your online presence, or more specifically social media presence by separating the other web signals. This platform let you to:

Monitor millions of source in real time

Show result and bring result from 42 different language

Allow you to interact and react fast.

With that tools, do some online research and make sure you chose to get a regular email every day with all the aggregation of mentions from the previous day. And it you tend to work with a large company or group, save the statistics to PDF or CSV to share those data with the team.

Mention provides 14-day Free Trail and there various schemes are available based on your plan to go for.

The Starter package includes, 3 users, 3 alerts and 3000 mentions per month only on $29/Month.

 

3. Talkwalker

Talkwalker Alerts provides a whole system so that you can build up a search query for the corresponding phrase or keywords and slender the outcome by language, frequency, result type and quantity.

Talkwalker provides

Brand name or keyword mention time to time

Sources of those mentions

Performance of brand mention

Influencers or audiences opinion including social media and web page

Sentiment analysis

Shows full result in demographic data with language, location and gender of customer

Talkwalker also contains a world map tracking system to find from where the traffics are being originate. To demonstrate the sentiment in each country, it shows pie charts hover over each place.

Since Talkwalker is a kind of replacement for Google Alerts, it’s not as thorough or comprehensive as Mention. It’s also FREE to use.

 4. Topsy

Topsy is considered as a deliberate search engine and more efficient than both Mention and Talkwalker tools for providing more far-reaching data. It tends to remain focused basically on influencers and trendy conversations.

Topsy lets you to:

Supervise brand mentions all across the social media and web.

Social insights from leading online conversation

Incorporates a real time database

Measurers audience’s sentiment and provides analytics report.

In addition, Topsy allows result to come sorted by links, photos, tweets, videos or include everything. Not only that, this engine also allows you to drill down and see how afresh the result is. For what, you can easily wade through a large amount content when necessary.

 5. PinAlerts

PinAlerts, I hope everybody does understand by the name at first glance. Though it’s a brand monitoring platform, but specially made alert system for Pinterest only. Let’s see what this tool is capable to do.

Monitors links to pins from and web and notify through email

Increase brand impression in Pinterest

By using this platform, you can just step into the conversation in Pinterest with people who share you pins and develop a healthy, trustworthy relation with them.

PinAlerts also helps you to find mentions of your brand’s/photos/videos/post’s URL.

 6. Hootsuite

Let me introduce with the todays most used and easiest brand conversation monitoring platform, Hootsuite. What are the most popular social networking sites? Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, right? Well, Hootsuite is generated to keep you on top of the conversations on those premium social websites in real time.

Craft a stream at first with your targeted keywords that impersonates your search, if you do care about using Hootsuite most productively.

Follow the steps, add a stream, and choose keyword and the account by which you’re supervising the brand. And then type the corresponding phrase or keywords to add it and then after that, add the stream.

 7. Built in Tools

Facebook Insight

It’s a built in tool by Facebook for page owner to measure the overall metric like reach/exposure, engagement, influence rate etc. about their content. That tool allows them to recognize what to do next and make some research for increasing growth rate. Apart from all, this tool is fully FREE to use.

 TweetDeck

TweetDeck is a built-in metric measuring app for Twitter. This tool is more like another metric measuring tool HootSuite in making of columns and organizing Twitter activity. It’s a FREE is to use tool also. Twitter management becomes so easy with TweetDeck and say what, it’s my personal favorite.

8. Klout

The reason we put Klout at the very last position in our tools list, is because of its controversial operating behavior. Some marketers find it extremely unprofessional and a useless thing, on the other and social marketers find it quite handy for measuring influence and engagement rate brilliantly.

Reasons to avoid Klout:

Inaccurate Scoring System

Inappropriate Interaction with Audience

Reasons to use Klout:

Brilliantly handles Twitter

Extraordinary capability for measuring influence and engagement rate

So far, Klout has been really one of the most used social media marketing tools for Twitter.

It’s up to you NOW!!

After such a long discussion, we hope that you’ve got some pretty clear concept regarding social media marketing metrics, how they work and what’s your responsibility as a business owner. Now you’re ready to take off and take action. Remember, consistency is and always has been the major key to attain success. Make sure you come up with brand new strategies each time you inaugurate any new product or new campaign. Measure the result and do the same.

Have you got the overall idea of Social Media Marketing Metrics now? Please do Share the post to let your acquaints be acknowledged about this profound manner of digital marketing. Subscribe Us to get the latest guideline more like this and don’t forget to put your valuable opinion in the following comment box. Stay with us.