When social first hit the scene people talked in terms of number of friends, followers and likes. Now we talk in terms of leads, conversions and quality of fans. My how the times have changed!

Part of this evolution comes from a maturation of both the medium and the people managing it. Companies are creating strategies and goals before ever designing a Facebook app or a Twitter campaign! Once you have strategies, goals and outcomes, it’s easy to identify the metrics to track and report on each month.

In the end, what you track and report on should translate to outcomes – brand awareness and consideration, engagement and intent, brand evangelism and lifetime customer.  Each one of your tactics should map to one or more of these outcomes.  For example, viewing a How To video could be a consideration outcome, submitting a review could be brand evangelism.

What are some of the top social media (SM) metrics?

This answer certainly depends on your strategies and goals, but I can walk you through some of the more typical ones to get you started.

SMU (social media users) engagement persistence – How much time are users spending on your Facebook app? How much time are they spending on your site when coming from a social site? How many pages are they viewing? What percentage of them are new and returning visitors?

Analytics tip: this is easy to do in Google Analytics by setting up Advanced Segments. If you’re not using Advanced Segments how can you know which users are the most/least valuable? It’s no different than putting your hand in your wallet and pulling out a bill randomly to pay the cashier. You’d never do that and you should never *not* qualify and quantify your visitors.

Once you have Advanced Segments you can use them to understand SMU impact on several other activities on your site.

Conversions - The next stop after setting up Advanced Segments is to set up Goals in Google Analytics. Since you’ve already laid out your strategy, goals and metrics, identifying Google Analytics goals is a snap. Use Advanced Segments to understand where users are coming from when they sign up for your email list, or fill out a survey or download your white paper. You’ll almost certainly observe some outliers and they’ll deserve your attention. Are the outliers indicative of the SMU or possibly the path they followed to get here? Analysis includes both identifying outliers, determining why they are so different from the norm and applying that learning to your entire campaign.

Don’t forget brick and mortar stores too. Connecting their activity with digital is significantly harder but there are ways to do it. Offer a promo code or coupon or collect email addresses and do a match.

Bounce Rate – Are users visiting via SM spending less time on your site? If so, maybe you should consider a different landing page for SMU.  Are they spending a lot of time on your site but wandering in the weeds?  Maybe you need to modify your navigation structure.

Social Media Loyalty – Re-posts and retweets indicate users find your content interesting and your brand valuable. Identify brand evangelists by tracking re-posts and retweets and engage with them. Have a conversation with them and invite them to do a guest post or product review.

Blog Interaction – Are users subscribed and clicking through to read your posts? Are they commenting? Which posts are the most popular and can you create more of that content?

SEO - Social can have an impact on SEO – both on organic search and inbound links. Tracking some basic SEO metrics should be a part of your analysis as well.

I’ve given you half a dozen metrics to start, but I can’t stress enough that the metrics come from your strategy and goals.  Don’t start with “number of fans” but rather start with “brand awareness” and identify which elements of your program translate to that outcome.  It’s so tempting to focus on the numbers, but if you don’t know what you want to achieve how do you know that any number is worthy of celebrating?