Strategic Use New Media Peaceful Social Change

40
Strategic Use of New Media for Peaceful Social Change
Measuring impact: social media
analytics and real-time tracking of
online campaigns
Private sector enterprises, governments and non-profits are starting to
realize that their interactions on social media platforms generate a lot of
useful data. This data can tell volumes about supporters, clients, investors
and constituents, but only if it is centralized, organized and visualized to
inform decision-making. There are many easy ways to use social media
analytical tools that help with exactly that. Generally speaking, the social
media metrics that can help us measure the impact of our social media
strategies include: 51
• Reach: number of followers and/or fans.
• Engagement: number of mentions, likes, shares, tweets and retweets.
• Referral traffic from website: amount of traffic coming to your website
from social media and/or the top URL addresses bringing traffic into the
website.
• Monthly number of unique visitors and/or reads to your website
and the comments generated are also important website metrics.
• Share of voice: the percentage of mentions within a certain sector or
profession.
• Competitive score: where your competitors stand in terms of reach,
engagement and share of voice.
A word of caution: social media metrics can generate a lot of data/
information that may not be useful to you. Social media analytics or metrics
that are useful to you are those that are directly related to your end goals
and objectives. Hence, feel free to discard metrics that are not useful. Also
note that some metrics may be worth your attention more than others. For
example, the high number of fans on your Facebook or Twitter pages may
be less important than the actual number of fans who engage with you to
help you spread your message by tweeting and sharing, and who respond
to you through concrete action. 52
51 Visual.ly. 5 Social Media Metrics That Won’t Slow You Down. June 25, 2013.
52 GoodData. Marketing Metrics Overload: What Really Matters. May 6, 2013.