Social Media Metrics For Dummies

Digging Deeper than Surface Metrics

Klout scores, Twitter followers, and other metrics are what I call surface metrics. Useful to the point of simply seeing that your account is gaining interest and being discovered, these numbers don’t tell you much about the quality or potential of the engagement.

You can actually get a better idea of how your Twitter followers, for example, are working for you by using real metrics. If you’ve been in social media for a while, you’ve probably heard of Gary Vaynerchuk, owner of Wine Library in New Jersey and VaynerMedia, among other things.

This December, Gary, who had over 900,000 followers at the time of the tweet, tweeted out a video he made titled “There is no such thing as social media” — a very catchy title tweeted out by someone who has a highly engaged following.

As Mack Collier pointed after studying the tweet’s effectiveness, that tweet garnered him 5,539 views and 47 retweets. That’s a return of .5 percent. That demonstrates that even for the most followed people in social media, follower count is a largely irrelevant number.

How would you make this irrelevant number into a useful metric? By tracking how many of those video views converted to leads and sales on the VaynerMedia or Wine Library sites using goals and advanced segmentation data from within our analytics.

One reason I tell folks to give little credence to Klout scores or Empire Avenue trade prices or other social media surface numbers also comes from the fact that they are ...