Chapter 5
Useful data inform, educate, and validate the work social media professionals do on their respective platforms. Metrics, which is data collected by a social media professional systematically, allow the business or brand in question to know what worked, what didn’t, and what to do differently next time. Social media professionals do not want to assume with this data; they need to accurate to be successful. Research can be extremely challenging in social media, but it is worth it in the long run. Social media managers have to listen to what the data are saying before providing commentary on what the data meant. Research, especially analytics, provides us with evidence of the impact and potential return these “waves” deliver us. Data drives the “pay to play for social media. Click through rates is how many time people clicked on a link to navigate to another website, and behavioral metrics are what actions people are taking on social media. Finally, vanity metrics are metrics that make all of us feel good but do not tell us anything about the process, I would call them useless, but people always need a good boast in life. Research is frustrating in social media, honestly, just frustrating in general, but critical in life.
Monitoring is the systematic process of understanding, analyzing, and reporting insights and conversations on reputation, brand positions, community health, and opinion of crucial audience members virtually. Listening, on the other hand, is about learning, exploring, and uncovering emerging trends, opportunities, activities, and issues that could impact the company either positively or negatively. Benefits of monitoring and listening:
- Calculating the overall growth of your community audience and behavior measurements
- Analyzing and measuring key trends surrounding an event, person, or brand compared to competitors and other significant parties in the community
- Determining the overall tone and sentiment of the community discussing a key player in a social media plan
- Understanding our audiences and what they are responding to the most
- Turning unhappy customers through proactive monitoring and interactions into loyal customers through relationship management practices
Types of metrics
Basic- followers, sentiment, and engagement
Advanced- dive into the actions and psychographics
Advocates- loyal and invested audiences who support the brand
Channel- unique to specific channels
Behavioral- explore download and lead generation
Conversion rate- how many clicks and actions resulted in sales divided by the number of clicks and actions are taken
Amplification rate- how much the content has been shared
Questions to ask yourself about your platform
- What metrics is the platform using?
- What is the payment model?
- Are the tools free?
- How does the platform measure each metric?
- How does it calculate the results in its reports
- Do that platform offer training and educational opportunities?
- How long has the platform been established in the field
- How much does a service cost?
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