Social Media MetricsTiffani Stephenson

Agenda

• Why metrics are important • Popular SM Metrics • Metrics in 4 parts• Reach vs. Engagement• Clicks vs. Retweets • Pageviews vs. Attention• Subscribers and Uniques • Navigating SproutSocial

Why they’re important

• Metrics allows you to:• track your brand reach and impact online, • find new sales leads, • develop existing customer relationships, • improve your website, • fine-tune your social media interactions

• With good metrics, you can see the ROI (return on investment) of your online efforts

Popular SM Metrics

• Conversions = the number of people who achieved a desired result. This could be paying for a product, signing up for a trial, completing a form, or any other goal you’ve set up for your campaign

• Leads = potential conversions. These include anyone with the need or interest to pursue your product or service

• Engagement = the total number of likes, shares, and comments on a post• Reach = a measurement of the size of audience you are communicating with• Impressions = a look at how many people saw your post• Funnels = The paths that visitors take toward converting• Visits vs. unique visits = Visits count each time a person visits your site or

page, regardless of whether or not they have visited before. Uniques count each person only once

SM Metrics – cont’d

• Bounce rate = The percentage of people who land on your page and immediately leave, without viewing any other pages; rate at which people leave your site after viewing only one page

• Exit rate = The percentage of people who leave your site from a given page. It’s possible these people have browsed other pages of your site before exiting

• Time on site = a measure in minutes and seconds of how long a visitor stays on your site before exiting

• Audience growth rate = a comparison of your audience today to your audience yesterday, last week, last month, etc

• Average engagement rate = individual post engagement compared to overall followers• Response rates = These can be measured in two ways, either as the speed with which you

respond to comments and replies on social media, or how quickly your marketing or sales department follows up with leads from social

• Inbound links = the number of sites linking back to your website or page

Metrics in 4 Parts

• Conversation rate: This is simply the number of conversations per social media post. On Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn, this would be comments. On Twitter, it’s replies

• Amplification rate: This measures the number of reshares or retweets on average for each post

• Applause rate: This accounts for the various ways a user can promote a post on different networks—Retweets, Likes, +1s, etc. (Side note: I love the word “applause” to describe this metric)

• Economic value: The sum of short-term revenue, long-term revenue, and cost savings

Reach vs. Engagement • Reach is the number of people who see your post in their timeline,

and reach is calculated by a Facebook algorithm that seeks to show Facebook users the content they most want to see

• Are we better off with a post that reaches far and wide or a post that is incredibly meaningful to a smaller number?

• Engagement is part of the reach algorithm. When someone clicks, shares, or comments on an update, Facebook takes that as a hint that the user wants more content from that page

• In this sense, focusing on engagement may very well lead to a larger reach organically

Retweets vs. Clicks

• Clicks tell us that the headline is interesting and helpful on an individual level. Someone reads the headlines and wants to know more about the story. In general, this is our No. 1 metric to determine the headline winner

• Retweets tell us that the headline is interesting enough to share with all of someone’s followers. This is a substantial compliment and one that speaks to the virality of the headline

• So, clicks vs. retweets comes down to individual appeal vs. mass appeal• Which one would you find more value in?

• https://chenhaot.com/retweetedmore/ allows you to test variations of headlines and predicts the response. The headline with the higher response rate may become the new headline on the post!

Pageviews vs. Attention

• Should we be more interested in quantity of visitors or quality of visitors? Or, which is more important: pageviews or engaged time?

• According to Tony Haile at Time.com, 55 percent—the majority—of visitors spend fewer than 15 seconds actively on a page

• The debate goes like this: • The attention crowd argues that pageviews are a vanity metric that fails to

relate whether or not a visitor even read or understood the page they were on. Pageview fans mention how difficult it is to accurately define and track a metric like engagement and how, by comparison, pageviews are straightforward and key parts to a well-rounded strategy

Subscribers and Uniques

• Email subscribers have given us permission to contact them directly• It’s a huge privilege to be invited into the inbox and a great opportunity to

share content and announcements that we know they’ll love

• Unique visits provide awareness in regards to IFAS, our culture, and our social media influence.

• We trust it’s a good first impression that these new visitors make and that they’ll return eventually

Where does UF/IFAS fit in on a conversion tunnel?

• Our efforts are to be at the top of our conversion funnel

• In other words, we aim to cast a wide net and bring in as many different leads as possible while helping to spread awareness and authority

• With this breadth in mind, we specifically aim for growing our audience, total followers

Navigating SproutSocial