What Are The Most Important Social Marketing Metrics?

In Socialbakers, we get this question very often: What are the most important metrics in social media? What defines the social media ROI? We determine the return from social marketing based on user engagement – the more users engage with your brand´s content, the better. We created an engagement metric based on that called the Engagement Rate which we monitor across Facebook and Twitter in our Analytics.

Facebook Average Post Engagement Rate

Twitter Engagement Rate

In social networks, you should be monitoring the following metrics:

• Reach / Fans – Number of your fans and followers, comparing it with competition
• Interactions / Engagement Rate – The interactions your activity and posts generate (obviously, having in mind that you actually do send posts)
• Wall posts / Mentions & Response Rate – Monitoring how well you are interacting with your fans and their questions

This applies to Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn and in a way to YouTube too (where a view can also be counted as a form of interaction, we will cover this topic later).

Companies out there focus too much on sending their content, but often forget to engage with their fans and do proper social customer care (aka “social care”). Companies should be looking at metrics such as the Response Rate to see how often they actually respond to their fans. On June 20th, we will elaborate on this significant topic. Oh, and isn't LeWeb London coming up? Stay tuned! :)

P.S.: Don´t forget to save the date for the upcoming Engage 2012 event taking place October 23rd in New York City! Find out more here.