Contrary to popular belief, you do not need an advanced degree in social media to understand its metrics. Even though there are many different metrics to look at for your business, the important question to ask yourself with each of them is whether or not that metric is helping you to make choices and take action.
Metrics are divided into four categories: consumption metrics, share metrics, lead generation metrics and sales metrics. Consumption metrics show how many time people viewed, downloaded, or listened to content. Share metrics are how many times people emailed, tweeted, or posted your content. Lead generation metrics show how often your content generates a lead. Lastly, sales metrics show just how often that you make money from your content.
Let’s take a look at 7 ways to better understand metrics:
- Content Quality—Instead of checking frequently to see if your content gets retweeted or your visitor numbers go up, take a look at the overall picture. For your website or blog, take a look at unique page views, time on page, and total page views. Unique page views means your reach is growing, longer times on page means that your content is interesting, and a larger total page views means that people are checking out more of your website.
- Referred Traffic—Use Google Analytics to see how much traffic is referred to your website from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or other social media channels. To make this metric work for you, set up goals as to where you want those numbers to be in the future.
- Interaction Count—Instead of looking at your engagement rate, which is skewed by purchased ads like on Facebook, marketers now look at the total interaction rate. You can then correlate this information with website visits to see how the interactions are stacking up with them.
- Conversion Rates—Using Google Analytics, you can see where your leads come from each of our social media accounts. You can then see the conversion rate for these leads. You can also use this for email campaigns and newsletters. Learn more about setting up custom campaign parameters here.
- Share of Voice—SocialMention is a free tool you can use to find the total number of conversations about your business. To find your share of voice, divide the number of conversations or mentions of your business by the total number of conversations of businesses in your market. You can also segment these conversations by channel to see where you need to improve.
Keep in mind that some metrics like page views and downloads are vanity metrics. They make us feel good about the work that we are doing, but they don’t lend themselves to making informed decisions. Taking a careful look at your metrics is the way to carefully guide your business online.
This article is written by Mickie Kennedy, founder of eReleases (https://www.ereleases.com), the online leader in affordable press release distribution. Grab your free 160-page copy of the Big Press Release Book – Press Releases for Every Occasion and Industry here: https://www.ereleases.com/free-offer/big-press-release-samples-book/