How to Properly Measure Social Media Success

There are literally hundreds of metrics on social media, but most of them provide no real value. Who really cares how many followers you have on Twitter, or "friends" or "fans" you have on Facebook? It doesn't matter how many posts per day you put out there. What really matters is everything that happens after you post or tweet.

Did you grab attention? Did you cause people to want to share? Did you initiate a discussion? Did you cause people to take an action? Did your participation deliver economic value? These are the outcomes you want from social media, and below are three recommendations from RoofPal on how to measure your real success online, regardless of the social media site(s) you participate on.

Conversation Rate
Simply, this is the number of comments or replies per post. You want to create a virtual water cooler so you can have meaningful conversations with your audience. I am not proposing that you just be provocative and say ridiculous things just to get people to comment - you want large volumes of people adding to the conversation, asking follow-up questions, and participating in adding new value.

Amplification Rate
This is the rate at which your connections share your content with their network. On Twitter, this is the number of re-tweets per tweet. On Facebook and Google Plus, this is the number of shares per post. On your blog or YouTube, this is the number of share clicks per post or video. You want to give your audience content they consider to be of such value and interest that they want to share it.

It is also important to understand what types of content causes increased amplification, when it happens and where (geographically) it is happening. Once you know this, you can fine-tune what you post to increase the likelihood everything you post will be shared.

Applause Rate
This is the rate at which your audience enjoys the content you share and endorses it to their connections. It also increases your placement in search (especially Google) for those connected to those you are connected to (for more, please see my blog post titled "Social media directly influences search rankings").

On Twitter, this is the number of "Favorite" clicks per tweet. On Facebook, this is the number of "Likes" per post. On Google Plus, this is the number of +1's per post. On your blog and on YouTube, this is the number of +1s and "Likes" per post or video.

A really good fourth metric would be Economic Value, but that is a much more in-depth conversation for another day (and another blog post). If you would like to discuss the economic value of social media for roofing or would like assistance setting up a social media metric tracking system, please email me at Chris@RoofPal.com.