Social Media Metrics

Activity Metrics

• Pageviews
• Unique visitors
• Members
• Posts (ideas/threads)
• Number of groups (networks/forums)
• Comments & Trackbacks
• Tags/Ratings/Rankings
• Time spent on site
• Contributors
• Active contributors
• Word count
• Referrals
• Completed profiles
• Connections (between members)
• Ratios: Member to contributor; Posts to comments; Completed profiles to posts
• Periods: By day, week, month, year
• Frequency: of visits, posts, comments

Survey Metrics

• Satisfaction
• Affinity
• Quality and speed of issue resolution
• Referral likelihood
• Relevance of content, connections

ROI Measurements

• Marketing/Sales
  
  • Cost per number of engaged prospects (community vs. other initiatives)
  • Number of leads/period
  • Number of qualified leads/period
  • Ratio of qualified to non-qualified leads
  • Cost of lead
  • Time to qualified lead
  • Lead conversion
  • Number of pre-sales reference calls (to other customers)
  • Average new revenue per customer
  • Lifetime value of customers
• Customer Support
  • Customer satisfaction
  • Number of initiated support tickets per customer per period
  • Support cost per customer in community
• Product Development
  • Number of new product ideas
  • % of ideas from customers/prospects/community
  • Idea to development initiation cycle time
  • Revenue/Adoption rate of new products from community vs. traditional sources

• HR
  • Retention/Employee turn over
  • Time to hire
  • Prospect identification cost
  • Prospect to hire conversion rate
  • Hiring cost
  • Training cost
  • Time to acclimation for new employees

Individual Metrics (for members)  NEW

• New 'friends' after 30/60/90 days
• Number of friends met online that users have met offline
• Number of friends met online that member has subsequently collaborated with
• Number of ideas that the user has gotten and then used in their work

General Internet Tracking (outside of enterprise-sponsored communities)

• Net Promoter Score
• Meme Lifecycle
• Number of mentions (tracked via web or blog search engines)
• Positive/Negative listing ratios on major search engines

Got More Metrics? email me at rhappe at idc.com

Comments

[Tim Schlotfeldt]

Hi Rachel,

thanks for your great list. For me as a german-based e-learning consultant this could be really helpful. I set up a wiki page with it at my e-learning-wiki: http://www.tschlotfeldt.de/elearning-wiki/Kennzahlen_Social_Media

I hope this is okay for you.

-Tim

[Rachel Happe]

Hi Tim -

Thanks for stopping by and adding these to a wiki - would love to see what the German crowd comes up with to add to this list!

Cheers -

Rachel

[Hans Henrik Heming]

Hi Rachel

This is indeed a very interesting discussion.

On a personal note I don't believe that everything can - or should - be measured.

I work as a Managing Partner in Wemind - a Danish consultant company coping with complexity, change and innovation problems. We use web2.0 tools a lot in our daily work :-)

When saying that not everything should be measured. I in fact believe, that not everything can be measured. Companies of today navigates in at complex world, not a complicated one. In a complicated world everything can be explained, as long you crunch the numbers long enough. That is not the case in a complex world.....

I think network theory, social dynamics and complexity needs something completely different as metrics - a hole new mindset.

The need for metrics is where we HAVE to explain higher output than a given input, and I must admit that we also in Wemind try to prove that simple equation. Why? Because top management still doesn't understand!

Two of my collegues have written a whitepaper on Social Capital which I believe fits the discussion - you can download a English version on one of our international weblogs - cph127:
http://www.cph127.com/download-free-whitepaper/

All the best
Hans

[Rachel Happe]

Hi Hans -

Thanks for the interesting comments - I think you have identified a important issue: at one level social interactions are impossible to quantify. However, business need to decide where to make investments and those who do this in a complex world - and use metrics appropriately - use them as one guide to understand what is working and what is not...but metrics without understanding of complexity and context is not very useful.

Thanks for the link as well!

Rachel

[Janet]

How about putting the "L" in the Lifetime Value of the Customer?

Thanks for the great list!

[SocialButterfly]

This is def. a great jumping start for social media metrics. Thanks for taking the time to share with the rest of us. I'm saving this to del.icio.us =)

Best,
SocialButterfly

[Cosmin Ghiu]

Rachel:

Great list. its been dugg.

[Marc Meyer]

Rachel, your background has some similarities with mine. Perhaps it might be our affinity to music and the music industry, in which I wrote a social media/song download business plan for back in 2000; and had previously created one of the first music review sites. But I digress, your post on SM Metrics is very complete and I'm going to share it with my readers on my site. Good to see we have some of the same people in common as well on Peeps to know!

Marc

[Tom O'Brien]

How about this one - Brand Advocacy - Online Promoter Score:

http://tinyurl.com/6zd3xw

Regards,

TO'B

[Rachel Happe]

Thanks for the great comments and additions - and for the Digg!

I believe that the 'Online promoter score' and the 'Net promoter score' metrics are the same but please illuminate if not!

[Brant Emery]

Interesting blog post - and very timely, I work on a new start-up social app (2collab) but as an extension of a large multinational publishing house (Elsevier) the need to measure our success and contribution is paramount and a process we're going through now.
But metrics are only a form of measurement - you still need to be clear on your goals and objectives, and then decide on a select few metrics that best support these (you shouldn't try to measure everything - this is senseless). A clear business strategy with clear USP, positioning, goals and milestones is still core, as are all the other business priorities that often get forgotten - An example being Hans' post and link to a whitepaper, which didn't download due an on-site error - yet no where on his site could I find a contact address to inform them of this broken feature. The key thing is remember that when you're measuring the effectiveness of an approach - don't place too much emphasis on a novel trend so that you end up misplacing the other essentials of business best practice (customer care, user focussed design, etc).

Brant Emery
development manager, 2collab

[Niraj Ranjan Rout]

Hi Rachel,
Thanks for this. It really puts a lot of my thoughts into perspective. Saved me a lot of thinking really :)

We build social applications (www.mobicules.com), and I am going to use this in our brain-storming sessions with a lot of our clients, who are all concerned with "quantifiability".

-Niraj
Co-Founder, www.mobicules.com