Getting a Grip on Social Media Measurement

• by Dan Bailey

The buzz continues for social media – and doubtless you’ve seen mind-boggling metrics thrown out on the size and popularity of such channels (take for example viral video “Social Media Revolution” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIFYPQjYhv8). But what are some good basics – tangible social media KPI (key performance indicator) metrics you can take to the bank? Chris Brogan (co-author of Trust Agents; see my previous blog entry http://wp.me/pHXxW-1i) does a good job writing about these on his blog (http://www.chrisbrogan.com/measuring-social-media-marketing/).

Hence and without further ado, here is Chris’s recommended list of social media metrics:

Of course the easy ones are your social networking sites giving you automatic lists of quantities of friends, connections and followers. LinkedIn automatically tells you how many people have been viewing your profile lately. This, my blog account, automatically gives me dashboard metrics of reader counts over time.

But what has really surprised me lately is how social media searches crop up in website analytics. Facebook now shows website results from Bing when searching from within the tool, so that even if you or your company doesn’t have a Facebook page, your website could be linked to directly. And now that YouTube is the second largest search engine, well, are you optimized for that?

Such findings don’t mean that the Web is (or is becoming) pure chaos. Nor does it mean that all channels Web are equal because they all lead to the same place. The need here is to plan strategically – with Web hub-and-spoke marketing. Pick your hub (doesn’t have to be a website), make it strongest, define your spokes and build them optimally as well.

– Jake Aull, www.zenofbrand.com