Social Media Metrics, Engagement, and influence
How often do you measure your social media?”
ROE and ROI are closely related; and neither should be considered independently. You need to define ROE as the Return on Engagement, and ROI as the Return on Influence.
How to begin measuring? We suggest a service such as SocialPilot.co which enables you to schedule your Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn activity – as well as measure and evaluate how your information is being shared.
While there may not be a best way to measure your engagement with your advocates and your influence with your audience, measuring interaction (engagement) and reach (influence) will allow for intelligent insights and data-driven decisions on the type of content that is posted.
Engagement and influence is how you measure the level of interaction (engagement) you’re having with your audience and the reach (influence) those interactions have.
Think about it this way: You’re reading this article possibly as a result of a referral or a Facebook post or tweet. If you’ve read this far, you’re obviously engaged in the article. If you do nothing but read it, I can’t measure what influence the article has had with you, but I can measure its engagement. If you share it with your followers or like it, then I can measure the influence of the article as well as my engagement with you and your followers.
To begin with, consider:
- What is my objective for social media? It could be awareness-building; cause-focused; educational; or simply to broadcast (counter-intuitive to interactions)
- Who is my audience? Think through the persona of the roles of the individuals you want to attract. If you cast your content net broadly, you’ll get lots of followers, but of lower engagement quality. If you keep your content focused on your mission, you may get fewer followers, but they will be of higher engagement quality and more attuned to your content and your cause.
- Is this audience using Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and others? You’ll need to identify where your audience is and if they are using the media. That means you’ll need to spend at least a little time looking at representative members of your target audience.
Engagement is interaction; interaction is conversation
Engagement is an indicator of how well you are interacting with your audience. Measuring your engagement in this manner is a key indicator of how well you’re engaging your audience and the interaction with your audience in order to build relationship, affinity and loyalty – which leads to influence*
Influence is interest; interest leads to action
Is your audience interested? Influence is an indicator of the growth of your followers across social media platforms, and level of interest of your audience in what you’re sharing. Simply put, influence measures the number of followers you have, and how they share your posts*
It’s a virtuous cycle; engagement and influence work together as in a face-to-face relationship. You’ll be interested in your audience, they will respond and express interest in you, and relationships will continue to be built.
Perception reflects your focused messaging
Using these tools to measure how you’re being perceived (an essential to brand alignment for any organization) will help you measure your focus of your messaging – because of course your social sharing will align with your communication strategy as defined by your mission!
While this may at first seem overwhelming, consider the measurement of social media return on engagement and return on influence as a path to follow over the next 4-6 months as you start to measure your ROE and ROI, and adapt your social media strategy based on the results of these tools.’
Don’t be afraid to start – your audience is looking for more ways to engage with your organization – you need to provide them the opportunities.
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