Social Media Metrics: A Study On What Companies Are Measuring When It Comes To Their Social Media Campaigns

Measuring and monitoring your brand in social media outlets is more important than ever. With customer word of mouth marketing on social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, etc, it is vital knowing what people are saying about your company. But that is only one use of Social Media. Marketing Sherpa recently completed a study of over 2000 companies to figure out what metrics companies were using to measure their brands online, and in particular, what percentage of companies were measuring each type of metric. Here is a simple graph of what they found (click on the picture for a bigger image):

Quantifying the Impact of Social Media

What was interesting to me, was the high percentage of companies monitoring things like traffic (72%), or number of followers (63%), but the relatively few using the information to their competitive advantage(19%) or to identify and profile their followers (e.g. their market) (17%). The higher percentages such as those looking for comments about their brand, or number of followers, or even what their followers are saying, does show that most companies are starting to catch on to the importance of social media marketing, but few are still tapping it for its total potential.

Each company needs to find a balance between what is useful versus what is ineffective, and prioritize their social media campaigns around that. For example, I could care less the “size” of my followers on Twitter, Facebook, and the like. I do care about the quality of my followers. I also do not care as much about the number of website visitors I get from those sources, but I do care about the quality of that traffic. If I have a Ultimate Frisbee site, I really only care about the traffic coming to that site, that is interested in Ultimate Frisbee. Those are the types of followers that ultimately convert, and those are the types of followers who share information about my target market or the quality of my products.