Social Analytics: Quality over Quantity

No... no... This is not a posting about the dating scene and how to help you find a good mate date.

It is about trying to figure out what are the proper analytics (KPI, Success events, ROI, etc.) for engaging with social media.

ClickZ has an article called "Web Analytics for Social Media". Essentially, the author says that you need to look beyond the typical web analytics metrics when engaging with social media because the brand engagement metrics are not the ones that we have been looking at in digital.

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Traditionally, marketers focused on quantity metrics like impressions. As the Web emerged as a marketing platform, we translated that approach to digital, emphasizing quantity metrics like unique visitors and page views. Later, as the Web matured into a bona-fide business channel, transaction became important: sales conversion rate, average order value, and so on. Web analytics, like much of the marketing world, has tended to focus on the short term, measuring marketing to do better marketing.
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I would counter this slightly. I have been preaching brand engagement metrics for the last 9 months now. So even if you are looking at a banner ad campaign or a pay-per-click/SEM campaign, there is no reason why you should not be measure Quality Metrics like "time spent per visit", "number of pages viewed per visit", "return visits", "product viewed during visit", etc. These tend to be short term, but if you extend beyond the single session/visit, it becomes less so. The problem is, of course, that most web analytics tools do not allow this kind of quality metrics to be captured and reported. ('nuff said on this issue... hahahah)

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But social media is different than transaction, and it calls for a different approach to measurement. Today we look at the quality of relationships, experiences, and, yes, transactions, and we look at them over time. Unique visitors, for example, is still an important metric, but so is registered users. And more important still are metrics like return visitor sign-in.

We also look at the amount of user-created content, but we're more interested in measures of qualified content consumption. It's great if someone comes to your site and buys your product, but it's even better if she returns for service, tells her friends about the product, buys an upgrade, submits a suggestion, blogs about your response to her idea, and so on...

Measuring marketing in social media isn't about measuring your marketing to do better marketing, it's about understanding the customer, uncovering opportunities, and informing strategy to run the business better. The real opportunity in social media measurement isn't to see how well you're doing in social media but to translate online conversations into true, actionable intelligence that informs business decisions.
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Yep!!! Quality metrics combined with quantity metrics can be a very powerful tool for marketers. In the past, marketers have had to choose between quantitative data (eyeballs & sales numbers) and qualitative data (surveys, etc). But in the digital space, you can have both! You can have your cake and eat it too!

The main issue here is to define those KPIs that you need for a social media compaign. These brand engagement metrics differ depending on the product, the social media, the campaign objective, and the ultimate website(s) that you are leading people to. Are you just trying to influence their purchasing decision or are you trying to sell online?... And oh yes... you need to track and report on these metrics too....

There are other nuggets in the article so pop on over.