Young Entrepreneur CouncilWhat is one metric I can use for measuring the success of my new social media hire?
1. Interaction With Your Brand Via Social
The key is to look at the overall “cohort” following and engagement with your company across all your social media channels. Do you have more likes, subscribers, followers and connections every day and is that cohort growing at a faster rate over time? At the end of the day, these counts are key for one thing: engaging with your brand. One million followers are useless if they don’t interact with you. – Joshua Dorkin, BiggerPockets, Inc.
2. An Improved Level of Engagement
Check the monthly reports for statistics such as number of new followers, comments, likes, favorites, shares and your overall engagement levels. Dig deeper by looking into the new followers: are they a part of your target audience? Don’t forget customer service queries and how they were handled. A social media hire should directly help improve engagement to strengthen your brand! – Stanley Meytin, True Film Production
3. Customers Generated
Social media managers today create content and engage with customers. And in today’s algorithm-driven social media world, they advertise. The metric to care most about is the answer to the question, “Is time and money being spent in the right place?” By focusing on the number of customers generated from each social media platform, you’ll be able to measure the success of a social media hire. – Brett Farmiloe, Markitors
4. It Depends on Your Brand’s Goals
If you want to track social media success, you have to be clear about your goals and how social media fits in. If you’re more concerned with branding, for example, then impressions and impression share plus follower/fan increase are key. On the other hand, someone who only wants more sales wouldn’t really be impacted by those factors — they care only about conversions. It really depends. – Jared Brown, Hubstaff
5. Increase in Searches For Your Brand Name
A big part of social media success is creating awareness for your company’s brand. If people are engaging with your social media efforts, they will become curious about your company and do a search on Google to learn more. An increase in these brand name searches is an indicator that you are achieving social media success. – Sathvik Tantry, FormSwift
6. Earned Media Creations
The best form of marketing is word-of-mouth (AKA earned media). You want to make sure you get people talking about your brand. This can come in the form of retweets and sharing your owned content and content that others are creating by you via prompt. The job of a social media person is to be the voice of your brand and get others to repeat the message. –Adam Stillman, SparkReel
7. Effort to Engage
One metric that is important when measuring the success of a new social media hire is the amount of effort they put in to engage with the audience. I like to look at the frequency of posts, the overall content/quality, and ultimately in return, the level of engagement coming back from the audience. You can measure this by looking at the reach, number of likes, retweets, comments, etc. – Gerald Wilmink, PhD MBA, WiseWear Corporation (C Corp, Delaware)
8. Bounce Rate Decrease
If your bounce rate (percentage of users who visit your site and leave after looking at one page) decreases, then your social media hire is likely doing a better job of attracting the right people to your site and managing that message better than before. The lower the bounce rate, the higher the engagement. But, we find that bounce rate is a quick and dirty snapshot showing the right tend lines. – Kofi Kankam, Admit.me
9. Number of Customers Referred Through Social Media
If the metric is linked to sales, the hire will not only ensure that the messaging and content is right, but also that the target audience is relevant. Any other metric carries the risk of being gamed. – Pratham Mittal, VenturePact
10. Monthly Interactions
Regardless of whether your social goals are skewed more toward branding or conversions, it’s a good idea to average things such as likes, comments, shares and retweets into a single metric to measure at-a-glance progress. – Sam Saxton, Salter Spiral Stair and Mylen Stairs
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