7 Social Media Metrics to Align with Business Goals

In a presentation I gave last week about building your social media strategy, I laid out five key takeaways that a small business owner or marketing manager can follow when design their own social media strategy.

The five key takeways are:

1. Create clear goals for social media activity driven by business objectives
2. Identify personas that clearly define your target audience and prospective customers
3. Spend some time researching which social media services your prospective customers use
4. Create processes to produce original content that builds relationships with prospective customers
5. Define metrics that allow you to measure social media activity against business goals

Setting clear goals that are driven by business objectives allow you to align activity against outcome.  In order to measure activity, you need to define specific social media metrics that you can track and trend on a regular basis.

7 Social Media Metrics to Start Tracking

You can get started right away by capturing these 7 social media metrics across each social media service where you participate and contribute:

1. # of followers / contacts
2. # of updates made by you by topic
3. # of new followers
4. # of actions performed by your followers
5. Referral website traffic
6. # of leads
7. # of customers

Capture these data points every month so you can trend activity over time, and you will be able to identify when specific contributions made by you have either a positive or negative impact on any of these metrics.

By: Davin Lelong