We’ve all been there, sat in a meeting with your boss, or client, and they’ve said something like: “Our competitors have got 40,000 Facebook likes and 20,000 followers on twitter more than we do, we need to double down on our Social Media!”.

Let’s be perfectly clear, tracking social media based on likes, or follower numbers, is a pointless metric. For a start, both can be easily gamed, but increasingly platform are moving towards more sophisticated content targeting which for many companies means their chances of getting an ROI out of social media is significantly reduced.

I couldn't agree more. I remember when we were first launching our social media sites for our brands at a casino/hotel company I was working. We were so obsessed with gaining followers, yet no one was really engaging with the content we were providing. Gaining followers was important, but if we weren't producing relevant content, then the followers would not lead to any brand equity.

The analytics that Facebook and Twitter are putting out are a good start:

Social media should never be considered a “broadcast medium” , its no longer suitable as a one to many distribution – it should be considered a discussion medium, where you can engage your audiences with your message, your brand and your personality.

Moving away from messaging and towards discussion and interaction reveals the true metrics you should be concerned with: Engagement rates!

Measuring Social Media Effectively

Thankfully, both Twitter and Facebook provide lots of metrics, and have robust, free, analytics platforms.

Twitter recently revamped their entire analytics platform and its accessible to everyone with an account just by going to http://analytics.twitter.com and it provides in depth statistics on a per tweet basis.

Being able to manage engagement has always been something I have been very interested in. Content is king and just broadcasting what you're selling or information that doesn't appeal to the many of your followers will result in ignoring your messages. This is very similar to email marketing.