November 2010

In this issue:

From the Editor:

I've got another packed issue for you! This issue talks about metrics. I've received a few questions tracking social media results and I saw the article below that provides a few tips for measuring the effectiveness of your Facebook Page and Twitter account. It also gives you a few resources for improving your website conversions.

As always, remember to Surf Safely - use your anti-virus and firewall's!

- Michelle

“It's true that we don't know what we've got until we lose it, but it's also true that we don't know what we've been missing until it arrives. ”

"Measuring Facebook Page Impact"

from Brandon Ely @ www.sitepoint.com

One of my panels at BlogWorld this past weekend was titled "The Ethics of Social Media Marketing" with Patrick O'Keefe, Jeremy Wright, and Jay Baer. During our panel, the topic of social media marketing metrics came up. The premise was that a lot of marketers who use unethical practices to increase follower or "like" counts are simply trying to push those numbers because management demands metrics, and it's all they know how to track.

As I said on the panel, follower and fan counts aren't the only metrics to track, and by far are the least important. Engaging with fans/followers is much more relevant than simply having a large number of people follow you. So how do you track engagement and interaction on your Facebook Pages?

Facebook Insights

Facebook Insights is a new analytics tool available to all page administrators. It offers detailed metrics on a number of factors such as tracking user growth, active users, and user engagement. Let's look at a few key areas you should be addressing.

The Monthly Active Users metric in your Insights dashboard shows you both the number of users (previously "fans") that interacted with your page in the past month, and the growth of this metric compared with the previous time period. This is a great way to gauge the overall engagement of users on your page.

Users

The Users section shows user growth over time -- "likes" compared with "unlikes." It will also show you a graph of your total users over time. This is a good way to gauge general reach. The Activity subsection shows page views and media consumption, which can be useful when looking at whether certain kinds of posts were more popular (for example, photos versus video).

Interactions

The Interactions section shows how users interact with your page. The Page Activity subsection shows mentions, wall posts, discussion posts, reviews, and videos posted to your page. It proves you're getting a message through to your users -- that your page is reaching people. This is where I think we need to be looking to determine whether or not our pages are successful. Unfortunately, the new version of this tool doesn't let you see historical data.

If you want more detailed access to this information, you can export custom date ranges of data from the Insights tool and look at the data in Excel, or write your own program to parse the data. We can only hope that Facebook allows access to this information via the Graph API soon.

Old Page Insights

The Insights Dashboard has been replaced recently, but the old version is still available. The current dashboard neglects historical data, while the previous one shows a graph of your users or interactions over a longer period of time. It lets you track total interactions, or just wall posts, comments, or "likes" individually on a graph. It also lets you look at post quality, number of posts, and interaction per post, which are all very valuable.

"Evaluating Your Twitter Profile "

It's a little more difficult to measure the effectiveness of your Twitter profile, because Twitter gives us no access to analytical data, unlike Facebook. Still, we can see how many followers we have, and who they are. Ideally, you also want to look at engagement in the form of @ messages and retweets, but I've yet to see an online tool that shows these easily and inexpensively. [If you know of a tool, please let me know.] Still, there are a few tools that can give you a good idea of how well you're doing.

Twitter Grader offers a simple analysis of your Twitter profile using a number of factors including followers, users you're following, words commonly seen in your tweets, and more. It gives you a score on a 100-point scale.

Twitter Counter shows you your follower growth over time. It also gives you access to a few other metrics such as recent number of people you followed and number of recent tweets.

TweetStats shows tweet frequency. When compared with follower count, this could lead to some deductions about whether more or fewer tweets result in higher following counts. The tool also shows the top replies and retweets, which are the users you interact with on a regular basis.

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Tips and Tricks

How to use Facebook for your Business

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Free Ebook on Improving Your Online Conversions

Google has recently released a free ebook aimed at users of Google AdWords. It explains how to use several of Google's free tools including AdWords, Analytics, and Website Optimizer to improve website conversions. Improving Online Conversions for Dummies is available to view online as a Google Document, or can be downloaded in PDF format.

The ebook outlines in detail how to set up conversion tracking in AdWords and goals and funnels in Analytics. It gives good advice on simple elements to test with Google Website Optimizer, and provides a step-by-step tutorial on setting up an A/B split test.

If you've already set up goal tracking in Analytics and conversion-rate tracking in AdWords, or have run an A/B split test using Google Website Optimizer, then you may be too advanced for this book. But if you're looking for a quick and dirty guide that will help you get started, it's a great read.