Priority: Awareness Metrics

How to measure the improvement of our Blog posts, Facebook posts and Tweets is a hot subject.
Many blogs write about Reach measurements, Awarness metrics and social media ROI is on everybody's mind. The number of options to measure social media seem to be more than the number of coffee combinations on Starbucks.

My personal opinion is that we complicate things too much in life and in business. The most simple things in life are usually the most genious and effective.

Here are 3 questions and 3 answers that can be applied to more or less any business.

1. Why are we going to be active in social media?


2. What platforms are appropriate for our business (Where are our custumers?)


3. What can we offer our audience through our social networks that we can't offer elsewhere?


How to measure our activities

Reach
Why measure reach? Well to be frankly honest this is the only number most executives ask for and you need to be able to tell how many people are in your brand community. But Reach has a minor value to real business. Reach on Twitter doesn't say much. Having 10.000 followers could mean 10 people saw your tweet and one retweeted you to his 10 followers where not a single one of them continued your tweets journey. But hey, this is a metric that we currently can't escape from so let's throw it in there.
Number of Likes on Facebook
Number of Followers on Twitter
Number of unique visitors on Blog

Awarness

Now we're talking reactions. Much more important in my point of view than Reach. This is where we see HOW people are reacting to our posts. Do they like us? Hate us? Want more/less? Can we help them?
Applause rate (read this post for some more details)

Number of comments per blog post
Number of retweets per tweet
Number of shares and likes per Facebook post
Number of +1s



Economic ValueEvery companys goal is different and here is where you need to set up goals in Google analytics.
What is a conversion for you and your business? Is it a sign-up form for newsletters? Is it a business transacion (that somebody actually buys something on your website) or is it lead generation (somebody requesting more info about your product?) Depending on your goals this can all be measured through GA.
Is your business offline? Do you sell chocolate bars in a store or cupcakes in an airport? Well then a suggestion would be to measure social-coupons. Make "only social-media offers" such as offering your customers a free coffe in exchange of a password only availible on Twitter. Count how many came in with the code and compare it with a day/week where you didn't have the campaign. This will definitily boost both Reach, Engagement and Economic Value.

That's it for today!
CheersTweet