If engagement is the holy grail of social media marketing, how do we know if we’ve hit the jackpot? How many of our visitors are fully engaged and how many are walking away?
Measurement depends on setting goals, establishing benchmarks and then measuring progress toward the goal. But is engagement too fuzzy a concept to be able to measure?
What exactly is this engagement thing we’re trying to achieve? According to a post at eConsultancy.org you want people to
- make a noise.
- store and share things.
- love your website.
- visit more frequently
- refer your company to their friends.
- buy into your brand.
- and of course buy your products.
I’m not so sure about the make a noise one. Any old noise is no good – they have to be saying good things about you to others.
What I do agree with wholeheartedly is that you have to give people a way to interact with you – online and offline. There is overwhelming evidence that people want to contribute, they want to be involved. They have opinions and ideas about your business. Witness the success of Dell’s IdeaStorm and MyStarbucks Idea.
And if you think it’s an odd notion that customers would want to have a say in your business, both these companies were featured in the Engagement study that showed that the most engaged companies in the US are also the ones that did the best financially through the recession.
So what activities count as engagement? These 36 are from Chris Lake who is working on a new social commerce start up in the UK.
A list of social interaction metrics / KPIs
- Alerts
- Bookmarks (onsite, offsite)
- Comments
- Downloads
- Alerts (register and response rates / by channel / CTR / post click activity)
- Email subscriptions
- Fans (become a fan of something / someone)
- Favourites (add an item to favourites)
- Feedback (via the site)
- Followers (follow something / someone)
- Forward to a friend
- Groups (create / join / total number of groups / group activity)
- Install widget (on a blog page, Facebook, etc)
- Invite / Refer (a friend)
- Key page activity (post-activity)
- Love / Like this (a simpler form of rating something)
- Messaging (onsite)
- Personalization (pages, display, theme)
- Posts
- Profile (e.g. update avatar, bio, links, email, customisation, etc)
- Print page
- Ratings
- Registered users (new / total / active / dormant / churn)
- Report spam / abuse
- Reviews
- Settings
- Social media sharing / participation (activity on key social media sites, e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Digg, etc)
- Tagging (user-generated metadata)
- Testimonials
- Time spent on key pages
- Time spent on site (by source / by entry page)
- Total contributors (and % active contributors)
- Uploads (add an item, e.g. articles, links, images, videos)
- Views (videos, ads, rich images)
- Widgets (number of new widgets users / embedded widgets)
- Wish lists (save an item to wish list)
How many of these do you offer on your site? How do you know which ones to add?
Go back to step one of your social media strategy and listen to the conversations – tap in to the needs, likes and dislikes of your visitors and customers. The days of deciding for others are long gone. You have to give them the tools they need and want, not what you think is right for them. Everything on this list won’t work for every site.
For example: A company that is involved in bath and kitchen makeovers is currently looking at adding social interactivity to their website. After taking the list of ideas the CEO has, and listening to his customers and visitors to the site, this is the proposed list
- Register for Alerts by RSS feed – to get new content
- Views (videos, rich images, design concepts)
- Use the design widget
- Put the widget on their blog or Facebook, etc)
- Feedback (via the site)
- Email subscriptions
- Favorites (add an item to favourites)
- Feedback (via the site)
- Forward to a friend
- Invite / Refer (a friend)
- Social media sharing / participation (activity on key social media sites, e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Digg, relevant design forums, blogs etc)
- Time spent on key pages
- Time spent on site (by source / by entry page)
How are you keeping track of your engagement stats?
Image: FoxPar4 on Flickr, some rights reserved
