When I first started in social media, which, not to date myself or anything, was before social media was a “thing,” it started with blogs. Yes, blog networks were the first social media networks out there. Then came Friendster, then Myspace, and then Twitter and Facebook, along with the social media eco-system as we know it.
What I’m trying to say is that I’ve been in the social media game for a long time. When businesses first started with social media, metrics were all about followers and fans. How many you had was all that really mattered. Since then, a lot has changed. With the increase in niche and community sites, follower count and sheer numbers aren’t as important as they used to be. Personally, I’d rather have a highly targeted community of 1,000 than a spread-out, unengaged community of 1 million.
We know how important it is to use social networks as a form of marketing. It’s vital to track and measure your success as well. It’s time to move beyond numbers and engagement only as a means of reporting. Here’s what you should be measuring.
CLEAT Metrics
Conversions
Leads
Engagement
Affect
Traffic
Conversions
Conversions are the most important aspect of the equation. Without conversions, you don’t have sales. Without sales, you don’t have a business. We use Infusionsoft to track our conversions and where they came from. If you find that many people are converting to buyers and customers through social media, it’s time to increase your budget there.
Leads
At ConvertWithContent, we live by the idea of lead magnets. You’ll find one at the bottom of this blog post. We track all of our lead sources and you should too.
Engagement
Engagement is the fun one. You can track it within your social media management tools or manually on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. A good measure for engagement is how many people are talking about your business, products or services, how many mentions you are getting, how many shares and retweets, and how many people are interacting with your messages. Engagement is a good measure to see if your message is getting through to your customer.
Affect
This is a sentiment measurement. Are people liking or disliking your product or service? In order to find this measurement, you will need to do a little social media listening. If you don’t know what I mean by that, check out this post here(INSERT LINK). The great thing about measuring sentiment and affect is that you have the ability to change people’s perception through a response strategy.
Traffic
We all love to see increased traffic to our site. It shows you which networks are strong for you and where you should be spending more time. Remember, increased traffic means increased leads, which means increased conversions and sales. TRIPLE WIN!
When you’re trying to figure out what metrics you should be using, go to the CLEAT method.
What metrics do you measure?
