A recent guest blog post on the Harvard Business Review website by founder and CEO of social platform Red Room, Ivory Madison raises the question if many of the benchmarks used to measure social media success are even relevant at all.
Commonly used metrics including page views, unique visitors, registered members, conversion rates, number of Twitter followers and Facebook likes are often analysed by themselves, but ultimately they fail the ‘So what?’ test and do not show how these results are converting into sales or customer loyalty.
Madison notes four important metrics all companies should follow – relevant revenue, that is recurring sales; sales volume; customer retention; and relevant growth, showing a traceable pattern in which actions of your existing customers create new customers. These metrics measure success of your core business, so to measure social media activities, you should look at the results the company is getting overall to track how your social media efforts affected the outcomes.
To read the full blog post, visit the Harvard Business Review website.
