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c h a p t e r6 :SOCIAL ANALYTICS, METRICS, AND MEASUREMENT■to your business. Always cite your own business objectives, your existing metrics, and
then build off of those to develop your specifi c set of key performance indicators and
related quantitative guideposts.P Table 6.1 Examples of Primary Social Media Analytics
Measurement Sources Details and Notes
Traffic Leads Based on the sources of traffic arriving at
your site.Tie this to your current customers’
behavior.
Membership Level The number of fans and followers, or
subscribers if the content is offered as a
free or for-pay subscription.How many of your fans are also follow-
ers? What percentage is active in more
than one channel?
Member Activity Number of members (registrants) versus
and actual unique visitors.What percentage of your membership
base is visiting you with some regularity?
Conversions Google Analytics, Your conversion funnel. What share of your social traffic is actu-
ally completing the activities you have
defined?
Mentions Social Media Analytics, Tweetdeck, simi-
lar counts.How many people are talking about you?
What are the trends over time?
Virality Send-to-Friend, cross-posts, Diggs,
similar.How much (or how little) is your content
being spread?Nick O’Neill’s “Social Times”
Writer and Industry Analyst Nick O’Neill publishes Social Times, a collection of reviews and
commentary on a variety of social media topics including the use of analytics. You can follow
Nick on Twitter (@allnick) and you’ll find the Social Times online site here:
http://www.socialtimes.com/about/Setting your measurements into your business context is an obvious fi rst step;
yet for the most part, businesses and organizations sometimes fail to formally recog-
nize and measure the impact of social media on business. Without such measurement,
it is a stretch to think that a social business program will ever take hold, let alone
thrive, inside a run-by-the-numbers business. Because most businesses and organiza-
tions are in fact run by the numbers, this does not bode well for an effective connection
between the Social Web and the inner workings of business, effectively relegating social
media to outbound marketing applications.
This is really unfortunate, as purely outbound marketing is probably the least
effective application of social media and social technology. Remember, the Social
Web—unlike TV and American Football, both essentially built for use as an advertisingNick O’Neill’s “Social Times”
Writer and Industry Analyst Nick O’Neill publishes Social Times, a collection of reviews and
commentary on a variety of social media topics including the use of analytics. You can follow
Nick on Twitter (@allnick) and you’ll find the Social Times online site here:
http://www.socialtimes.com/about/