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.

TrackMaven has put out a white paper documenting 13.8 million pieces of content from 8,800 brands. With the massive amount of options to post content, are organizations providing relevant content to their users. The key to digital marketing is providing relevant (targeted) content to customers to provide great customer experiences. With that in mind, have marketers been using relevant content or is there still a shotgun approach.

TrackMaven documents Pottery Barn on an initiative they had to increase their "engagement" on Pinterest. The mistake they made, which a lot of marketers make when it comes to social media channels, is to increase the amount of content. Increased content = increased impressions = increased engagement, right? Not so fast.

What is happening in this example is the number of pins are increasing, however the average interactions per pin is decreasing at about the same rate. So in effect, they are working much harder to engage the same amount of customers. I love this chart, because it shows that more is not necessarily better. In the database marketing world, my push is to always increase frequency, whether that be purchases or trips to a casino, etc. But the key metric to look when frequency starts to increase, is does the worth of the customer per transaction decrease and at what rate.

In this case, frequency of pins is increasing, but the engagement is not, so the content is not relevant, there's just more of it. Pottery Barn isn't the only guilty party when it comes to this tactic. As TrackMaven saw, a lot of brands were implementing the same tactics.

The good news is Potter Barn (using TrackMaven software of course) was able to identify this and change tactics. Instead of focusing on content designed to sell certain items, more like an advertisement, Pottery Barn started to pin content that helped their customers make their home better. Of course Pottery Barn goods were front and center in this approach, but they posted less and focused on relevancy to their customer to change the engagement equation. So the new equation is:

More relevant content = increased engagement

Pottery Barn results with new relevant content strategy

Much better content has resulted in the end goal, more engagement through Pinterest.