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

MORE - This post is a great compendium from the Interactive Insights Group

ROI Analysis

While metrics are nice...justification is a little different.  I'll start adding some posts that I think address this issue nicely.

Other Resources

Hutch Carpenter from Connectbeam's Thoughts

Amber Naslund's excelllect presentation linking they why to what in regards to social media metrics and tracking.

Listen and Learn: New Media, New Metrics

View more presentations from Amber Naslund.

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!