Is social media better off with a better measurement of metrics?

When an enterprise organization should compare the success of its social media initiatives one important parameter is metrics. If your measurement show a positive indication with the metrics used your company management will properly let you continue using the resources on your Social Media project.

Is that really what it takes to have success to be able to show initial metric such as:

• Page views,
• Time on site,
• Number of comments 

Are these metrics valid for marketers, when comparing investments in other marketing activities?

There must be other and more intuitive toolsets that can enrich and enlarge our use of social media to another level. A company –Crowd Factory have announced that they have improved the analytics toolset of Social Media metrics. Crowd Factory claim, that they have given the marketers the ability to track;

                      Social sharing in real time

                      Social reach

                      Social impressions

You can now give your marketing campaigns a social lift and see the contribution that social enriches your marketing effort and bottom line. Crowd Factory claim that their new analytics available will include:

• Social Reach and Social Impressions:  Customers can use the “social reach” metric to see how many people were exposed to their campaign through social sharing.
• Share Rate. Crowd Factory’s new “share rate” metric provides a precise measure of campaign virality, showing what percentage of campaign visits generate a share.
• Click back Rate. While it’s important to understand how many people shared a campaign, an even better measure of earned media is Crowd Factory’s new “click back rate” metric: the percentage of people who actually clicked on the shared content.
• Influencers. Crowd Factory customers can now not only how many people generated a visit from their sharing activities, but also see the social reach and social impressions attributable to an individual influencer.
• Social Lift. This metrics allows marketers to see how much impact social sharing had on overall campaign traffic, by showing what percentage of people who visited a website or campaign came as a result of receiving shared content.
• Total Profiles. As marketers move beyond one-off campaigns and seek to build a social database, this new metric provides insights into how many people completed social actions and how many social profiles were generated from all Crowd Factory social campaigns.(Source: Crowd Factory 2011)

Does these new and promising analytics from Crowd Factory help us to become better social media marketers? 

One thing is for sure, if they work as promised it gives us a certainty to be able to present for C-level that our used money used on Social Media is done in a prober and accountable way. This gives the company a value of being on track if it is positive and negative you can just close the social media in the next budget round as metrics show it is not for us.

In a world of change, should metrics be the only parameter for developing of Social Media?

Nobody will doubt the value of measuring and using metrics. In all communication, you need to keep it simple to have the highest success rate. When you complicate the purpose of using Social Media in your communication, you will experience that the value, will be diminished and the interactive purpose of the communication will disappear. It is up to you as marketer and content developer and context finder, to make sure that the shift from persuasion to influence has to be with respect towards your costumers. To answer the headline of this blog - yes you will be well of having proper metrics getting the most knowledge of your costumers behaviour. To have success, you have to have other purposes if you want to develop your Social Media strategy.  You need to create the frames of interactive communication going from one-to-many to Many-to-many.