HOW TO Measure Engagement – Social Media KPIs

I think that social media measurement is something that  should be undertaken with a sense of perspective: Stand Back and Look at the Big Picture.

A wide screen approach to social media measurement may not be enough for your number crunching boss who would want to see proof for this optimism.

Do not worry, there is a lot you can measure, but first things first. Its all about engagement and interaction. The goal of your social media strategy should be to provide the tools for people to engage with your brand / people / products / services.

It is important to understand that both financial and financial KPIs are important is measuring the success of your campaign. Non-financial KPIs more often than not lead the way to for your team to work on the financial KPIs. Let me explain this with an example. A Facebook campaign will get you a fan following (non-financial KPI) which will build a nice big database for your email campaign. Now it depends on how successful your email campaign is to convert the fans to customers (financial KPI – ROI). Here, I would like to mention that the email campaign and facebook campaign would continue to run together. Facebook is where your conversation with your prospective customers started and that’s where the engagement has to continue to build the trust.

(More to follow on how to build social communities and run an effective social media campaign in subsequent posts)

For now, here is a list of some KPIs:

1. Social Media sharing/participation (activity on key social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, etc.)
2. Fans
3. Followers
4. Groups (owned/joined/group members/activity)
5. Like this
6. Posts
7. Comments
8. Forward to a friend
9. Print page
10. Bookmarks
11. Feedback
12. Reviews
13. Messaging (onsite)
14. Testimonials
15. Ratings
16. Polls (participation)
17. Report spam/abuse
18. Tagging (user-generated metadata)
19. Favorites
20. Alerts
21. Email subscription
22. Invite/refer
23. Downloads
24. Install widgets
25. Personalization (display, themes, pages)
26. Registered users
27. Uploads (add an item, e.g. articles, links, images, videos)
28. Views (videos, ads, rich images)
29. Wishlists (save items to wishlist)
30. Time spent on key pages
31. Time spent on site (by page, by entry page)
32. Profile (e.g. update avatar, bio, links, email, customisation, etc)

The above lists comes out of the actions that you want your users to perform, which would be one or all of the following:

• You want people to make a noise.
• You want people to store and share things.
• You want people to love your website.
• You want people to visit more frequently
• You want people to refer your company to their friends.
• You want people to buy into your brand.
• You want people to buy your products.

Please feel free to let me know if I missed some. Let me know if they are any good at @ajaxjoshi