Activity Metrics
- Pageviews
- Unique visitors
- Members
- Posts (ideas/threads)
- Number of groups (networks/forums)
- Comments & Trackbacks
- Tags/Ratings/Rankings
- Time spent on site
- Contributors
- Active contributors
- Word count
- Referrals
- Completed profiles
- Connections (between members)
- Ratios: Member to contributor; Posts to comments; Completed profiles to posts
- Periods: By day, week, month, year
- Frequency: of visits, posts, comments
Survey Metrics
- Satisfaction
- Affinity
- Quality and speed of issue resolution
- Referral likelihood
- Relevance of content, connections
ROI Measurements
- Marketing/Sales
- Cost per number of engaged prospects (community vs. other initiatives)
- Number of leads/period
- Number of qualified leads/period
- Ratio of qualified to non-qualified leads
- Cost of lead
- Time to qualified lead
- Lead conversion
- Number of pre-sales reference calls (to other customers)
- Average new revenue per customer
- Lifetime value of customers
- Customer Support
- Customer satisfaction
- Number of initiated support tickets per customer per period
- Support cost per customer in community
- Product Development
- Number of new product ideas
- % of ideas from customers/prospects/community
- Idea to development initiation cycle time
- Revenue/Adoption rate of new products from community vs. traditional sources
- HR
- Retention/Employee turn over
- Time to hire
- Prospect identification cost
- Prospect to hire conversion rate
- Hiring cost
- Training cost
- Time to acclimation for new employees
Individual Metrics (for members) NEW
- New 'friends' after 30/60/90 days
- Number of friends met online that users have met offline
- Number of friends met online that member has subsequently collaborated with
- Number of ideas that the user has gotten and then used in their work
General Internet Tracking (outside of enterprise-sponsored communities)
- Net Promoter Score
- Meme Lifecycle
- Number of mentions (tracked via web or blog search engines)
- Positive/Negative listing ratios on major search engines
Once I had a better understanding of what metrics entailed, I searched around for some articles to help me understand what this is all about.
Folk Media had an interesting article called Social Media Marketing Metrics. It speaks of social media marketing experts who claim that the value of social media cannot be measured. To that statement they say "bull crap." It points out that yes social media is "free" but for a company to do it correctly it takes an investment of time and money. It lists some suggestions for those companies wanting to start measuring right now:
- Set up a monitoring system (their first step in measuring). Measure what is already there. Use Facebook's ability to see fan page hits and demographics and other similar systems.
- Decide on messaging and monitor response. What is your core business message? They use the example of Starbucks $4.00 latte that they promote and can easily track.
- Tag team the response. Basically by having your employees understand what is going on and the platform, they will be able to help monitor things online.
- End at the beginning. Bookend your strategy with a monitoring system. Continue to follow through on conversations. Tweak your messages based on click-throughs and comments.
Social Times has another good article called The Ten Social Media Metrics Your Company Should Monitor. As you may have guessed, it lists the ten metrics that it believes your company should measure. It shows the following top three things that most companies measure:
- Visitors and sources of traffic
- Network size (followers, fans, members)
- Quantity of commentary about brand or product.
These are obviously the easy to understand metrics. The list of ten is quite thorough and can be adapted to suit your business objectives. As measuring social media becomes more of the norm, more complex methods, custom tools and custom reports will become necessary. If you really want to attempt to determine your ROI on specific goals, then you are going to need to adapt to the more complex measurement methods that this article summarizes.
On the site Social Media Today, I found an article called 5 Social Media Metrics You Should Be Measuring. I liked this one a lot. It made sense to me. It talks about dashboards and bit.ly accounts which I knew nothing about prior to this class. There is a social media monitoring tool that can be used to create charts to represent comments over time. Another new word for me was Klout. The Klout Score uses data from several of the big social media sites and measures:
- Your true reach (how many people you influence)
- Amplification (how much you influence them)
- Network score (how influential they are)
A very simple measurement that this article mentioned was sentiment. Sentiment is whether people are saying positive, negative or indifferent things about your brand. There are tools to measure this as well. Although it is argued that a computer simply cannot measure irony and the like so sentiment would be impossible to measure with a tool.
The bottom line is that there is an overwhelming number of things that you can measure. The key to success in finding accurate metrics is going to be to align your measurement plans with your objectives. I don't know if I personally believe that you will ever be able to accurately measure ROI. I feel that the best thing that you will be able to take away from all of your efforts is going to be very general. You will know if what you are doing is working and what is happening. I just don't know if you will ever be able to be extremely precise and accurate. Some may spend too much time and money chasing after the perfected metrics report, and some will have to accept that they are monitoring what is going on and are pretty aware of whether or not it is working.
I found a presentation on Slideshare that I liked. Check it out here if you have a chance.
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