Although it’s great to see your Facebook followers rise above 1,000, your tweet retweeted 20 times, and your YouTube video viewed 15,000 times, none of these achievements are particularly meaningful if they don’t fit into a broader social media strategy.
The first step in developing that strategy by answering these questions:
- What are your business goals?
- How can social media help you meet them?
- How can social media support and amplify a conversation around your organization?
This section focuses on ways to set goals for using social media, linking them to your strategy, and measuring success using easily accessible tools such as Google Analytics and Facebook Insights. With so much data available online, the intent is to provide some guidance and support on not only what to measure, but how to zero in on what the key metrics might be for your project.
Setting Your Strategy
The best way to evaluate your social media efforts is to align your efforts with results you can measure. Some of the outcomes you may choose to focus on include:
- Engagement: How engaged is your audience with your content? With discussion? What are the levels of interaction and attention?
- Impact: What impact is your social media strategy having in readership, and in real life? Are you broadening or deepening the conversation?
- Reach: How is social media connecting your project to the audiences you want to connect with? Is there a ripple effect on the web?
In addition, no matter what other goals you have, you will probably want to ask these questions:
- What forms of social media are helping increase page views, time spent, and the number of unique visitors to my website?
- Which social media tools are most effective for my topic and audience?
- What types of messages have been most effective in increasing conversation, participation, and connections between users and my site?
- Is there a sense of shared community, discourse, and discovery that my social media strategy and efforts are supporting?
These are great questions to ask as you frame goals.
Time spent/pages viewed
What are the time spent metrics for the users coming to your site from social media? Are these users engaged enough to have time spent and pages viewed metrics as good or better than those demonstrated by users who go direct to your site?
Number of followers
How many followers does your account have? At what rate are you adding followers (or losing them?) How influential are your followers — do you have any Twitter whales, for example (accounts with over 5,000 followers)?
Retweets
How often are your tweets retweeted or quoted? Do people reference your account in their tweets?
Buzz
How are you shaping, participating in or curating the conversation? Are your blog posts discussed widely? Does your posting drive discussion of specific issues, terms or keywords?
What CAN you measure?
Common metrics used to measure website traffic are page views, total number of visits, unique visitors, time spent on the site and number of pages viewed. In addition, analysts look for upward and downward trends.
In social media, some of the equivalents for these metrics are number of views or downloads of videos and photos, number of followers on Facebook and Twitter, the number of Facebook interactions, and the number of Twitter retweets.
As you evaluate the statistics, answer these questions:
- Who is using our site and who is engaging in our social media?
- How are we supporting diversity, discussion and civic engagement through these efforts?
- Is our strategy driving quality users back to our site?
- Is social media helping us source news and issues we would not have otherwise found?
- Is social media bringing us contributors and commentators we would not have otherwise worked with?
- Who are the site’s largest contributors?
- Is the number of content contributors increasing or decreasing?
How do you know how often to measure results?
There’s nothing wrong with checking your web statistics on Google Analytics and Facebook every day, but you should be checking your stats weekly, or at the very least, every other week. As a basic way to know what’s working you want to take a regular, ongoing look at:
- Number of Facebook “Likes” per week
- Number of Facebook interactions per week
- Total number of Facebook and Twitter followers
- Number of retweets in a week
- The reach of specific Tweets
No matter how frequently you check your statistics, make sure to compile monthly stats. This will help show you overall trends for your site, and will be most requested by advertisers, sponsors or other supporters.
For Some, Email is Still the Way to Go
By Sonya Bernard Hollins, Community Voices, Western Michigan, [email protected], www.comvoicesonline.com
At Community Voices in West Michigan, we work hard to connect with many of the readers who have come to know us through our original bi-weekly publication. When we went online, we had a hard time keeping those readers who are not as “into” the Internet as we would like.
So, we use iContact, an email newsletter service, to send out weekly ‘blasts’ to those on our list.
We also have added Facebook links to stories to allow people to share them with friends, as that seems to be a central gathering place for many of our readers.
We update our Facebook page at least once a day, usually around noon or 1 p.m., as people return to the office from lunch.
iContact is my main source of information distribution until I can find something that is more effective and allows me to recruit more viewers with less work.