Most companies now have a Social Media strategy in place, whether it be in use for PR purposes (as a lot of big companies are doing with Twitter) or for Lead generation (this is the side that most marketing companies are talking about). Regardless of your approach, it's going to be important to understand how things are working for you.

There are some important statistics that you're going to have to monitor, like audience size and interactions, but if you're active across multiple platforms this can get a bit confusing. The fact that there are hundreds of different terms being thrown around, all of which basically mean the same thing, doesn't exactly help. On top of this, there's some more important and all together more interesting things you're going to want to monitor, and they may not be the first thing that gets drawn to your attention.

What I'm going to do is break down for you all the different things that might get mentioned in a report to help you get a clear picture of how your campaign is going.

Audience

It's obviously important to know what your audience size is. At the end of the day, if you're using Social Media, you want people to be aware of it. The following terms all mean exactly the same thing, but in a slightly different context.

• • Friends

  • Followers

  • Connections

  • Fans

  • Subscribers

  • Circles

The thing that makes these different is merely what platform you're on and what kind of account you have. If you're on Facebook you're either going to be looking at Friends or Fans. If you're on LinkedIn then it's Connections and Followers. Twitter is simpler, you just have to worry about Followers. With Google+ it's about how many circles you're in (or rather how many people have you in theirs). If you are managing a blog then subscribers is the important term for you.

Interactions

Once you're comfortable that your audience is at a good level you're going to want to know about interactions. This is the number of people who are engaging with you or your posts and there's a lot to know. If you're using Social Media for PR then this is going to be really important to you, you'll want to get a really clear picture of who's talking to you, what they're saying and how you're engaging with them.

Again, there's an array of different terms here that can be used and I'm not going to drill down into too much detail, as there's enough for a whole separate article.

• • Posts

  • Comments

  • Likes

  • +1's

  • Share's

  • Replies

  • Messages

  • Tweets

  • Retweets

The terms differ depending on the platform, as well as the impact that it will have on your post. In a nutshell a share or a retweet is the most powerful, but with the exception of messages, all kinds of interaction are geared to increase the likelihood of people seeing it. The more people that engage with you or your posts, the more people will see it as a result. This is how things go viral.

Web Traffic

Depending on your reasons for using Social Media, this is either going to be the most important information you'll get, or something you ignore completely. If you're using Social Media for PR, it won't be at the top of you're priorities. If you're using it to boost sales, or to drive traffic, then this is going to be what you start getting excited about. Particularly if you are hosting a blog on your website as we are, this is going to give you some very cool insights.

If you do care about web traffic, you'll want to have analytics set up and there's a lot of expertise that goes into understanding all of this. Just remember what you want to know is the percent of web traffic that is coming from your preferred Social Media platforms. This is pretty straight forward to find out, and gives you a good basic reading of how well things are working.

Beyond that, the important things to pay attention to are the percentage of people who leave straight away (Bounce Rate), the average number of pages visited and the amount of time spent on the site. What this will tell you is not only how effective your Social Media activity is at driving people to your website, but how relevant that traffic is to your end goals.

In summary. There are 3 things you want to keep track of: Audience, which in spite of the varying terms, is pretty straight forward and not that revealing; Interactions, a great measure of how people view your brand and how good your content is; Analytics, the only valid way of measuring how Social Media is effecting web traffic and the quality of that traffic.

If you found this post interesting why not leave a comment or share it ↓