Which Social Media Measure Matters?

Measures and marketing go hand in hand. There is little point investing time and money in activity that is unproven in its gains. The question is, when you get asked to report back on your social media activity which measure matters? This article seeks to guide you toward the most pertinent information, so you can concentrate your efforts in the right places and tailor your reporting accordingly.

What outcome does your organisation need?

It sounds like an obvious question but it can be easy to lose sight of the end goal. If you have ever paid for advertising through Facebook, you will have been asked at the outset what outcome you would like for the advert, web traffic, engagement etc. That's because playing a numbers game where hits and clicks are wins is different from encouraging page likes, shares and comments. In my experience social media works best for the latter but certainly shouldn't be ruled out for the former - with the right kind of content.

If your organisation is looking for website hits and conversions, then prepare to cover this in your reporting. However, you can always support conversion data with other social data which is explained below.

Figure out the best way to identify conversions

What constitutes a conversion depends on your answer to the first question, what does your organisation view as a successful outcome? If you are advertising to raise awareness then the number of new followers, page and post likes will be important to you. Where you are looking to encourage an action, such as 'Contact Us' or a purchase, the conversion will be firmly placed on the number of hits of you get on your action trigger. In Google Analytics you can set goals which will count hits on valuable actions. If you can also place a value on each conversion, you can add this information against your goal. It can be difficult to work out a value and very much depends on how accessible this information is in your organisation. Adding a value will make things easier for your advertising because it helps you to set a budget that works best for conversions.

Include Assisted Conversions for social media

Social media is great for relationship building and as a result there are additional measures that can be included alongside conversion data. I recently discovered Assisted Conversions in Google Analytics and it has helped me to add important insight on the overall contribution made by social media channels. This data highlights conversion paths that have seen a social interaction at some stage.

For example, you see an advert on Facebook and decide to click on the link to learn more. At that particular stage you may have an interest but perhaps not an immediate need. A few weeks later, your need/desire may lead you back to that organisation but this time you may search for them on Google. If at this stage you take an action that the organisation considers a conversion (purchase or contact etc.), that conversion source will be identified as an Organic or Direct Search. In this example, social media has not been given any credit for 'assisting' that conversion. However, using the Assisted Conversions analysis you will be able to see how many conversions social media played a part in generating.

In my own analysis of Assisted Conversions I can see that social media channels frequently feature as a 'First Interaction' for conversions. This makes perfect sense because the social channels provide targeted, educational content that signpost people to relevant pages on the website.

Find your Assisted Conversions in Google Analytics under CONVERSIONS>Multi-Channel Funnels>Assisted Conversions.

Don't ignore soft measures

In every campaign I run as well as reporting on conversion data, I also drill down to the post level engagement. This tells me a lot in terms of the appeal of the advert/post itself. For example, the number of shares indicate that people felt it was relevant to pass onto their own network. Shares are a great result because they help to expand reach beyond the paid or organic catchment. Comments and reactions are also a key indicator of how the advert/post has been received. If positive engagement is high against a campaign I will keep testing alternatives on the same theme.

This is a sample of post level engagement data for a promoted post. In terms of hits and clicks I would investigate how many of these 500+ link clicks converted against the goals set. What I can also determine against the soft measures is that this post has been shared 17 times and the comments and post likes suggest it was reasonably well-received. Whether any of these numbers are impressive at all depends on the expectations of the campaign against budget applied.

Focused reporting

However you report on your social media outcomes, be clear and concise with the data you provide. It is easy to get overwhelmed with the wealth of data available and lose sight of the organisational expectations of the social media activity. I would highly recommend investigating Assisted Conversions because it reveals so much more of the valuable role social media plays in the customer journey.

What do you report on? Do you find it difficult to prove social value? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.

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