Social Media Metrics For Dummies

Listening Frequency

I talk about how much time to spend listening in Chapter 6, but it’s important to reiterate here: It’s tempting to spend vast amounts of time listening to and studying your metrics data, especially after you figure out how it can help you narrow your sales funnel quickly and make your content and site better overall.

Don’t forget, however, that you still need to give your customers good service! One of the things you’ll begin to track on social media metrics is sentiment. Sentiment is the emotional aftertaste left by your brand after a customer interacts with it. You want this feeling to be positive as often as possible!

You’ll be able to tell whether you’re spending too much time on the tweaking and not enough time on the service or product you offer if the sentiment surrounding your brand begins to decline. Google Analytics doesn’t track sentiment, but many other programs, including Radian6, do.

You can also maximize your listening time by maximizing your metrics. Dayparting, segmentation, sentiment tracking, eye tracking (if you have the means, you can actually track what parts of your site visitors view most, and when, and then follow where their eyes go on the page), click tracking, comparison data — all these things lead to better understanding your customer. The company who knows their customer best and delivers what they need wins the war for the customer’s attention.