My Top 10 B2B social media marketing metrics. I have used 100s of metrics since I first started doing social media in 2009. However, not all metrics are effective. Some are easy to measure but sadly might not be a good alignment to the campaign objectives. In these cases you will never REALLY know if you are on track or not.

This is my personal list of the top 10 B2B social media marketing metrics to measure and why. Let’s get started shall we? In reverse order.

Metric number 10 – Employee advocacy contribution

How many of you have employee advocacy programs? If you answered yes to that question then here is a follow up question. How many of you are tracking the contribution of your employee advocacy programs to your objectives or goals in a real easy way? Having this ability is a massive boost to recognizing the value of your program. This enables you to make a return on investment calculation. How amazing is that? Often you can show value without having 1000s of employees using the program. Find a program that not only enables you to do employee advocacy but also measures the effect too. Not all of them do 😉

Metric number 9 – 1st touch attribution

There are many digital attribution types to measure. I discovered that tracking the 1st touch web site visits often is very useful. However this is only advised when the social media activity is deployed to work this way. It can be measured by many tools, and I have used Google and Adobe in the past very easily.

The best ever result that I have obtained for this metric is 87%. This was for a 6-month campaign. What was interesting is that “the 87%” that visited the target web site via social media as the 1st touch channel downloaded the targeted document more and shared more via the social sharing icons than any of the other first touch channel visitors (Adobe Analytics).

Metric number 8 – Lead conversion rate

This one had to be there in my top 10. Leads that convert are valuable. My top tip is a simple one here.
Understand the target audience! My experience is when the target audience is well defined in social media terms, and the creative and budget is well devised, then the results are often good. Do not take short cuts with defining the audience. Three more tips:

• Connect Ad accounts with standardized naming and tagging into your social media management tool
• Use the Facebook conversion API
• Use the LinkedIn conversion API

Metric number 7 – Earned media value

I often deploy this to measure B2B campaigns when there is a need to show ROI. This is also a super way to measure the success of employee advocacy programs. Earned media value is not that complicated!

Metric number 6 – Storyline adoption

I love storytelling in social media campaign planning. It really needs a deep understanding of the target audience. I have presentenced on many occasions on just this topic.

key is how to develop the storylines for each target audience. This is an advanced topic that I cannot do justice to here. Next in importance is how to track each storyline. I am fascinated to see how each storyline performs. I tend to find storylines based on real people perform the best, compared to a technology but there are many success factors to work on to achieve success.

Metric number 5 – Video retention %

I have a lot of experience with video metrics. Using video in social media is very effective. Often people use video views but trust me, this is only a small window into what is actually going on. Video retention % provides more clues but again you need more metrics than these two for campaign effectiveness measurement. However, video retention rate % often highlights the key success and failure points within a video’s timeline.

This metric is available in almost all video platforms so go check it out.

Metric number 4 – Earned to owned ratio

This is a very nice metric, and one that I often look to when doing week to week or day to day quick checks on campaign performance. I suggest to develop ratios as benchmarks. These can be based on brand choice, channels, paid, organic, or language-country combinations.

In this way you can quickly see when something magic is happening. When a ratio of 1:3 is normal and it jumps to 1:28 you know you have something special happening.

Metric number 3 – Engagement rate

This one had to be in my top 10 and somewhere near the top. It is my most measured metric for sure. There are many ways to measure it. Over the years I have debated with fellow social media experts about which formula to use. Include or exclude clicks? People have their favourites ;-). Below is a diagram where I show just some of the versions of engagement rate that you can find.

I really do not care that much which formula you prefer as long as you measure it consistently, and learn what drives success.

Metric number 2 – Share of voice

One of my favourites is share of voice. There are many ways to measure this, but it really does depend on the campaign objectives. Do you want your share of the social media buzz compared to a carefully selected list of competitors? Make sure each is compared on a non-biased keyword list. This is what I find is the biggest issue. I have to really spend time checking that the keyword list represents terms common and normal to all competitors. Weed out the branded terms that create hits for only one player.

Be careful with LinkedIn results via 3rd party tools. Due to the LinkedIn API you might not get all the competitor figures to compare with yours.

More tips

• Set up alerts to get a heads up of big changes to the % share figures
• Share of voice can work for “your company vs. the industry as a whole” if you do not have defined players to compare to.
• Guard the keyword list with your life. Stop people who mean well but have access to the keyword list and add branded keywords, or industry players who are not really industry players.

Metric number 1 – Insights from your social media marketing

If you have heard me speak at a social media event you will have heard me use the phrase “insights are like currency for me”. Insights are like solid gold bars. Yes you make a report from a campaign but what insights can be derived. I have had many interns over the years and I have taught each of them to not only present the results in terms of the metrics, but also the insights.

Insights can take many forms. They can be derived from basic reporting or social media listening. Here is an example list:

• Have the existing competitors found a new niche or approach that has gained them some success?
• Are there new players or competitors and what is their unique spin?
• What mistakes or errors have been spotted that competitors have made and how can they be avoided?
• Discovering new posting times or days that consistently get better results for posts?
• Identifying new ways to use content on existing or new social media platforms.
• Finding alternative metrics that give a tighter alignment to campaign goals or objectives
• Product feedback that could give better sales results in existing sales regions or in new ones
• Feedback on products or services that are seen as crucial to include for enhancements to the current or new ranges to come.

I could write a book about all the interesting insights I have discovered since I started social media marketing analysis. That “currency” I might cash in on one day!

Selecting the right B2B social media marketing metrics

Now that I have listed my top 10 social media marketing metrics, let me end with a few words on selecting the right metric.

• Always start with your business objectives or goals. Metrics must be selected that will track these objectives. Do not select the easy “I have always used this” type metric.
• Define the target audience well. This leads you to the right platform to run your campaign and thus the right metrics available for that platform that align to your objectives.
• Correlation is not causation
• Finally how will you measure the results? Use a good quality tool to track your metrics and set up reports and alerts. Do not be afraid to create custom metrics when standard ones do not do the job. I used Excel at the beginning in 2009/2010 for custom metric calculations when I had to.
  No excuses. Measure, measure, measure!

Have fun and learn from every report!