Social Media Metrics: It's Not Impossible

     Social media metrics is a realistic and pragmatic topic for organizations. Although social media has rapidly matured over the last decade-plus, the topic social media metrics remains indifferent for many. It should be realized that just like any marketing medium, measurement is a critical component of success for social media. While the unawareness of social media metrics is due to the difficulties in measurement: social media metrics is immature and hard to achieve. For many companies, to measure social media with regard to its effects seems to be very challenging, and even impossible, At its core, digital measurement is contingent on controlling the customer experience and laying tracking hooks along the way to understand response and subsequent behavior. However, social media's foundation challenges this very tenet: The consumer is not in control after all.

    With the unexpected rapid development of social media, a lots of social media metrics tools came into being, which not only indicated the increasing awareness of the importance of measuring social media effects, but also provided tools and approaches for companies’ utilization. I believe social media metrics will evolve quickly as marketers attempt different approaches to help make sense of all the activity data generated by social media interactions—social media metrics is something that’s very possible. If we regard social media exerting power on people as a whole, then social media metrics works as the evaluation link, helping better establish and revise objectives as well as work out social media strategy and tactic. To this extent, social media metrics is not only possible not also essential.

    According to our class discussion, social media effect can be measured in four ways: Exposure—how many people have reached with your message; Engagement—how many people actually did something with your message; Influence—are engagement metrics positive, negative or neutral and Action—did your conversions lead into another, more valuable entity. To measure these four areas, various kinds of metrics tools are available such as googletrends, Klout.com, tweetreach, etc. Although these social media metrics tools can help to measure social media effects on a larger scale, but as for me, I think what online tools can achieve are superficial. If a company really wants to gain deep understanding of audience’s feedbacks, depending on online metrics tools is insufficient.

    For example, if an organization want to measure the effects of their Twitter account, by using tweetreach, they can get lots of data including number of accounts they reached, number of contributors, number of retweets/replies they gain in a unit interval, even a list of top contributors and a list of most retweeted tweets. The tweetreach.com provide us a comprehensive and detailed analysis for companies to measure the effectiveness of their Twitter account, from which they can get information about the “Exposure” and “Engagement”. But I think, a company shouldn’t stop here. If they want to get access to the feedback of their customers— the information of “Influence” and “Action”, other resource method such as content analysis and survey should be utilized.

    Overall, social media metrics is aiming at changing the relationship between an organization and its customers. Since social media is getting it this far, it is a great time to be a digital marketing measurement practitioner.