6 Tips For Social Media Metrics
Statistics can be tricky in and of themselves, but add in a little Twitter and a lot of Facebook and you’ve got a confusing array of numbers on your hands. Here are 5 tips on what to look for, what it means, and what to do with it:
1. Send Mixed Messages
In social media campaigns, it’s hard to track the effectiveness of your actions if you’re only sending one message in one way. By sending the same message in different ways and through different channels, you’ll be able to get a better idea of what is and isn’t effective alongside who is and isn’t responding. Instead of having one Twitter account for your entire organization, break it up into different subsets that make sense for the things that you’re doing. Take Whole Foods, for example. While their corporate headquarters is on Twitter, so are a number of the local stores. Following @wfm_nashville keeps me in the loop and what’s happening down the street, which is way more important to my wallet than what’s happening in another state in a boardroom.
2. Adapt to Visitor Trends
Let’s take a look at Blend’s visitors for a moment. Since we launched our website, an incredibly interesting trend has emerged that is evolving the ways in which we spread our messages (including the news about this very post). People that come here from Facebook spend an average of 43 seconds on our site. People who land here from Twitter spend an average of 9 minutes and 17 seconds looking at all we have to offer – 1295% more than their Facebook counterparts. It’s easy to see why this is the case. Most of the people following me on Twitter are marketers who are interested in social media. Most of my friends on Facebook are people I’ve met in college or high school that haven’t the least bit of interest in marketing but are nice and click on my status anyways. The idea here is simple: take notice of who’s visiting you and what you’re doing and concentrate your efforts on the people that care.
3. Find an End Goal and Measure Progress Towards That Goal
If you don’t have an end goal for what it is that you’d like to do with your social media campaign, you’ll spend a lot money and a lot of time on something that’s bound to fail from the very beginning. It sounds simple, but you’d be amazed at the number of executives I’ve met that can’t tell me why they want their company to be on Twitter and what they think that presence will do for their customers.
There’s a restaurant here in Nashville called Miro District that does some basic, but interesting things with social media. From time to time, they tweet out offers of unlimited fries (it’s a nicer restaurant, so this is particularly interesting), special offers for service workers, and live music that they’ve lined up for the night. They have a simple goal (increase business), a channel that’s easy to spread messages with, and a hostess to count the number of heads that come through the door each night after a new campaign. They know what they want and I’m willing to bet that they’re probably getting it.
4. Avoid Things That Work For Other People
This point is contrary to virtually everything they’ll teach you in business school and the way that the business world tends to operate. Just because it works for someone else, doesn’t mean it’s going to work for you (unless you’re the same company, which you shouldn’t be). Instead of monitoring your progress with metrics that others use, discover the ones that work for you.
If you want to increase store traffic, spend some time seeing if your campaign brings more people into the store and what those people are buying. But, don’t forget about what your campaign might do to virtual traffic as well. Look for ways to ease people towards the behavior that you want them to exhibit and give them some incentives to point them there. People respond to things that are personal, interesting, and relevant to them and they tend to virtually ignore the things they’ve seen before. One problem that a favorite luxury retailer of mine faces is its own practice to send out thank you notes. It’s amazing the first time, but it loses its flare each additional time after that. Then, once other companies start to copy it, it becomes the norm rather than the exception and the norm is never where you want your social media strategy to be. People simply don’t talk about normal things. If someone else has already done it, you’re better off doing something else.
5. Evolve Your Metrics
Similar to the last point, don’t get too attached to one metric over another. Your metrics will change over time as people’s behavior in response to your campaign changes. If you obsess over the number of Facebook fans or pure website traffic without attributing both meaning and purpose to those metrics, you’ll get so lost in a sea of trying to figure out what’s happening that you’ll never get around to actually doing anything interesting.
6. Don’t Get Distracted
It’s really easy to get distracted by the nearly infinite possible number of metrics that fit with social media. The important thing to remember is that you need to find a balance between action and measurement. Some things are just hard to measure and if you waste your time trying to measure them, you’ll lose time and resources that could have been spent doing things that make your customers smile.
At the end of the day, if you have a decision to make between doing something interesting and calculating all of the different ways and different outcomes of doing something interesting, think of which option will help connect you to your customers and make them really want to spread your great idea. Metrics are necessary for measurement, accountability, and improvement but actions will always speak louder than numbers.
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