Measuring Social Engagement

Let’s talk about how to measure engagement. Now, engagement is kind of a fluffy word, right? What the heck is engagement? We want to talk you through how we measure it, how we track it, and then how we make sure to tell the rest of the team on how we're doing. A good post to read with this lesson is Jen Lopez's Social Engagement Metrics that Matter!

Conversion Rate

The three things that we really focus on are conversation rate, applause rate, and amplification rate. Again, those sound like just big fluffy words, but bear with us. Conversation rate is the number of audience comments or replies per post. So that means if somebody replies on Twitter, somebody writes a comment on Facebook, or they even write a comment on your blog post, those are ways to check for the conversation.

Applause

The next one is applause. Think of applause as somebody who just like, "Yeah, I like it." So that's going to be a plus on Google+, a Like on Facebook, or a Favorite on Twitter. So those are ways that you can look at applause, how much somebody actually likes what it is that you've posted.

Amplification

The next piece is the amplification rate. Now, amplification rate is kind of the big one. This is the one that people send it to the next group of people. So that is somebody retweeting, resharing, taking your blog posts and resharing it across any networks, that sort of thing.

Again, the three things that we're looking at are conversation rate, applause rate, and amplification rate.

Measuring Engagement

We use True Social Metrics to track our engagement. They have a free version, and they also have a paid version, which gives you more data. You actually go in and you connect Twitter, Facebook, Google+, your blog, YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, and Tumblr -- I think those are all the ones that you can add -- and it starts tracking. It will actually go back 30 days and start grabbing all that information for you.

From here, we decided to take it one step further. What if you take the number of followers that you have in each area, on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and you look at the engagement per follower per each one? Then you can actually look at Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, and you can make them apples to apples. So you're actually looking at a user on Twitter, a user on Facebook and how much they particularly engage.

You can do this through True Social Metrics as well. This is something that we've started to do. Our key focus is to increase followers, but also increase engagement. So that means that we're finding the right followers who are actually engaged in what we talk about. Those are the people that you want, not just a big number of followers with nobody engaging.

We capture these numbers weekly. We throw it into a spreadsheet. We have these numbers that go back years and years, and you can actually get all this information. We capture it weekly, and then on a monthly basis we tell everyone about it. So we have an email that we send to all staff, and in that email we actually show not only the engagement, but we're showing the traffic as well. Like in this particular screenshot, you can see that both on Facebook and Twitter, essentially, exactly the engagement rate, the traffic looks the exact same.

Reporting

We also create a dashboard. It makes it really easy for anybody to jump in at anytime and see exactly how we're doing. What you can do is you jump in, and you take a baseline. We've averaged this from the first week of this year of 2014. We decided on what the percent increase is, what our goal is, and then you can keep it up to date that shows you the goal or your current as opposed to that goal at all times.

We ran a number of tests to try to get people more engaged since we saw this huge drop-off in November and December. Hopefully, there will be another bump up soon. But it's the kind of thing that, when you have it month-over-month, you can see a trend of what's actually happening.

The other thing is you really need to focus on how individual posts are doing, although, for us, the thing that we capture on a weekly basis is the overall engagement so we can see that trend month-over-month. We’ve also have a spreadsheet that you can download that can help you get started so that you too can capture all this data. Good luck.

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