5 key metrics every Community Manager should be tracking

If you’re a community manager with responsibility for looking after the presence of a brand on Twitter, Facebook or one of the other major social networks then it’s likely you’ll have access to a considerable amount of data.

Here at Metia we love data. It influences and drives the social media strategies we create for our clients, it takes the guesswork out of what we do and allows us to show our clients what really works for them. In a nutshell, data delivers results.

But when your job is to create and amplify content you’re probably not going to be able to stay abreast of all of the data on offer on a day-to-day basis, so we wanted to pick out the key metrics that you should be tracking as a community manager.

1. The Basics

We like to think of these Likes/Favourites/Retweets/Shares as the bread and butter of engagement – it’s a good indicator that your audience enjoys the content you’re producing. Keep an eye on what kind of content is generating these nods of social approval and use that knowledge to help guide your ongoing content decisions. Sharing of content through Retweets/Shares are particularly valuable and are an enhanced validation that what you’re doing is right. It also helps to organically grow your audience too.

2. Your Audience

Growing a community organically helps to deliver those really deep levels of engagement that ultimately drive sales. Keeping one eye on the number of followers is useful but we’d also advise you to track the new followersjoining your community. A quick scroll through your new followers list on a daily basis will help you to identify key influences who you’ll want to engage with regularly - create a list on Twitter to focus in on their conversation.

3. Deeper Engagement

In a world where you only have a couple of seconds to grab the attention of an individual as they freely (and quickly) scroll through a Facebook or Twitter feed on their mobile device, you’ll want to illustrate to your client those moments where people stop, take the time to tap out a reply and hit the send button. These rich engagements of Replies, Comments and Mentions allow you to continue a conversation but also share that conversation with the rest of the community.

4. Driving Traffic

When you devise a social media strategy for a client the first question should be, ‘What are we trying to achieve?’  Invariably it will ultimately be to drive sales but there could be a host of incremental goals along the way, e.g. download a brochure or capture an email address. Track what your audience is clicking on from your tweets and Facebook posts but also (on a less-than-daily-basis) understand where your audience goes once they have left the social network, if possible.

5. Clock-Watching

This is a metric which may require you to brush up on your Excel skills. Export raw data from Twitter and Facebook to find out when your audience is most receptive to your content and understand what type of content works at specific times of the day. You may be surprised to see how video content performs across different times of the day – working with clients in social media for many years has led to some very interesting insights for us at Metia which helps to deliver exceptional results. This might just be the most important tip you’ll learn this week as a community manager.

These are just the basics – the really great community managers never stop honing their skills when it comes to tracking and understanding what resonates with an online community. Track the metrics above and you’ll have made a good start to delivering better results.

If you're looking to create deeper, more meaningful conversations with your customers through social media we’d love to hear from you.