What are social media metrics?

Social media metrics is the data used to assess the impact of social media activity on marketing campaigns and a company's revenue. These metrics help to assess how well you are accomplishing your goals in the social space and provide insight to where you can modify your campaign.

Why are social media metrics important?

Social media is an important part of any content marketing campaign. It is not just a soap box for you to broadcast your message to your followers, but a platform on which you can engage with those interested in your company and industry. Like any part of a content marketing strategy, it requires metrics so that you know how well you are accomplishing your goals.

Metrics in social media can tell you a considerable amount about your audience. You can learn the types of the content and the topics that they are most interested in, how well your efforts to build brand awareness are going and whether or not you are successful in encouraging these followers to enter your sales funnel. As you gain these insights, you will be able to modify your campaign as needed.

What are examples of social media metrics?

There are a number of different types of social media metrics you can use, depending upon the goals you want to accomplish on the platform. For example, shares, likes and followers are all good ways to see if you are successful with increasing brand awareness.

Comments on your social platforms or on the articles that you distribute through social media can help you understand how engaged your audience is with the types of material you are putting out.

How your backlink profile and traffic rates grow in response to social media distribution can also help you see how successful you are at engaging the search, social and content trifecta (link to search, social and content project piece).

1. Volume measures how many people are talking about your brand and the number of posts that mention your brand. Track this metric over time to see how customer engagement changes.
2. Reach measures the potential size of your audience. Use reach in comparison to other engagement metrics to discover how many people participated in your campaign in comparison to your audience.
3. Engagement measures how many people participate conversations involving your brand. This can include sharing content and commenting on posts.
4. Share of voice measures how you brand compares in conversions to your competitors.

How to build a data-centric social media campaign?

1. Look over your past activity on the platform and see the topics and content types to which your social media audience most frequently responded.
2. Develop a strategy that reflects a concrete goal for this campaign and ways to measure success.
3. Understand that most social media followers are at the early stages of the buyer’s journey, so they are most interested in awareness stage and consideration stage type content.
4. Create content that reflects understanding of why people share content.
5. Distribute content and measure reactions through the predefined metrics.
6. Make adjustments to improve your next campaign.

Social media is an excellent opportunity for you to engage with your audience personally and encourage them to enter your sales funnel. By using social media metrics during your campaigns, you will better understand people’s behavior and be able to create content more tailored to their needs.

Related materials

• Full guide: Best Practices for Social SEO
• Execute an Integrated Campaign Successfully

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How do I know if my YouTube efforts are successful?

YouTube offers marketers the opportunity to reach over a billion users. At the same time, however, since it is a 3rd party platform, it can be a challenge to know if your efforts are successful.

YouTube, since it reaches such a broad audience, typically is used for boosting brand engagement and awareness. Understanding how to monitor these factors will allow you to see how worthwhile your YouTube efforts have been and how you can produce better results in the future by using your data to streamline your efforts.

Metrics to watch for to monitor YouTube success

Branded Traffic and Your Share of Voice

YouTube is a valuable tool for increasing your brand awareness. As you create engaging videos that help people better understand or learn about topics of interest, you expose them to your brand and what you have to offer. Monitoring your Share of Voice and Branded Traffic can be a good way to know if you succeed in this endeavor. The BrightEdge Share of Voice tool can be valuable to help you accomplish this goal.

Referral Traffic from YouTube

Make it easy for people to click through from YouTube to your brand website by including a link to your page in the description of the video and on your brand’s YouTube page. It is important to note that YouTube is not known for large amounts of referral traffic, so just because this number is low does not mean your videos are failing. Rather than looking at the number, you want to look at the pattern-- if the number increases, then you know your videos are having a positive impact.

YouTube analytics

YouTube also offers you a few different options for monitoring your video success right on the platform. You can measure engagement by tracking watch time insights. You can also monitor factors such as Likes and Dislikes, Audience Retention and Sharing, which all add valuable insights into what people think of your videos. Here is a complete list of the currently available analytics.

YouTube is a valuable resource for your organization to increase brand awareness and improve your reputation, but it can be a challenge to measure your success. Using these three main categories of metrics, however, will help you gain the insights you need to improve your YouTube strategy and integrate it into the rest of your campaign.

How does PR relate to content marketing?

With the Internet and content marketing, customers have changed how they look for information. Rather than wait for brands to come to them, they actively go online and research the products and services that they desire. These customers also help to spread publications and articles about topics that interest them through social media. This has changed how PR professionals promote their brands.

Publications have also changed. Now, it is not just major newspapers and magazines that PR professionals can look to for coverage. Now there are also a host of online blogs that are actually highly respected publications. Even the brand’s own blog can be a useful way to spread information to the company’s audience.

It is also common for major publications to be most interested in thought-leadership pieces that are written by authors with large followings that will come to read the piece. These publications want to increase their own exposure.

What is content creations in public relations?

Both content marketers and PR professionals want to present their business to the general public as an authoritative, useful resource. They want to form a relationship with their potential customers.

Many PR professionals are already beginning to notice the relationship between their sector and the broader digital marketing industry. According a report published by Vocus State of PR:

• 78 percent of PR professionals use social media to share and promote content
• 50 percent use social media to share coverage
• 44 percent cultivate relationships through social tools
• 29 percent make pitches to reporters through social platforms.

As more professionals notice the link between PR and content marketing, those who fail to adopt the latest techniques will find themselves falling further behind.

How do PR and marketing work together?

1. Have your PR team and content development team discuss common goals, such as brand awareness, to help them see how their efforts can complement each other.
2.  Educate your employees about the unique roles of PR and content so that the end goals of each are understood. Content marketers want to tell the brand story to connect with people, PR wants to reach the right people. They want to get the brand image in front of customers build a positive reputation.
3. Know when to use major PR outlets for announcements or news. This will vary depending upon the company and the extent of their social presence. News you want to come from an authoritative source might be better received if it was published in an established publication if you only have a small social audience.
4. Regularly publish high-quality content that provides value to the users. This is the type of content people share, which can then spread brand awareness.
5. Measure your customers’ reaction to your content and PR strategies and adjust when necessary.

PR and content marketing are quickly colliding as professionals realize the value of content in promoting brands. PR professionals who want to remain relevant in the digital marketing world should keep these principles in mind as they move forward.

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Why is having the best mobile SEO strategy important?

Customers today spend increasing amounts of time on mobile and they are exploring all types of content. According to Google, more searches are now performed on mobile than on desktop. It's an SEO must that you learn to optimize content for mobile. 

Emailmonday found that between 15 and 70 percent of your email opens are going to be done on mobile devices depending upon your target audience. There was an increase from customers spending 30 minutes a day watching videos on mobile devices in 2014 to 39 minutes in 2015. At least 78 percent of smartphone users and 70 percent of tablet users also report performing at least one search per day. Regardless of the type of content you produce, you need to make sure that it is optimized for mobile.

What does it mean to optimize content for mobile?

Mobile devices have small screens and users are often on-the-go. They might be on a train or bus commuting, in a coffee shop or in a store. Optimized content understands the mobile user. It easily adjusts to fit on smaller screens and does not use a font that is so small it cannot be read, only one of the major reasons to optimize content. Videos that are not compatible with mobile devices should not appear on mobile sites. Email messages should load quickly and not have too many images that make it difficult for the user to scan the message. When you optimize content, it flows easily between desktop and mobile devices to provide the user with an outstanding experience.

What are the best mobile optimization techniques?

1. Recognize that nearly any type of content you develop may be viewed on mobile, and that creating a strong user experience requires you to make sure it is ready for this possibility.
2. Make sure any videos on your pages are compatible with smart devices.
3. If possible, make your content scrollable, rather than forcing people to click through multiple pages, which can be challenging on mobile.
4. Make sure your images are high-quality and closely cropped to maximize detail, even when shrunk to fit a smaller screen.
5. Any buttons on the screen should be easy for mobile customers to use.
6. Use a responsive template for everything, including emails.
7. Do not use long paragraphs, which can be cumbersome on devices. Remember that people are moving when on mobile -- long paragraphs will often lose them.
8. Keep the motivations of your on-the-go customers in mind. If most people come to your site looking for certain types of content, such as directions, optimize content and make it easy to find.

Mobile devices now dominate a significant portion of the online space. To be effective marketers, you need to make sure that your content is ready for these users and easy to engage with regardless of the device. Optimize content and become successful in SEO.

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How do I do landing page optimization?

Your landing page is one of the most important parts of your site. It is the page where all of your hard work to nurture visitors and encourage them to get closer to you is put to the test. Here customers have the opportunity to convert and either become an official lead, supplying you with valuable information about who they are and the motivations they have for visiting you, or they become paying customers.

As humans, we like to think that our decisions are driven by facts and objective reasoning. Research has shown, however, that an impressive amount of our decisions are driven by emotion. In other words, whether or not your customer converts on your landing page is not just determined by objective reasons that you are the best in the industry. Rather, your page needs to be optimized to make sure that your visitors feel good about the decision to convert on your site.

What elements impact landing page SEO?

There are two key content elements that you need to consider when determining whether or not a user will convert on your site.

• Your offer
• Your images

What offer should I have on my landing page?

A quality landing page will make a compelling value proposition. You will show your visitors a clear advantage to converting on the page. This offer will be described using engaging language. You might have testimonials from past customers or logos of customer brands indicating that reputable organizations that have found this offer worthwhile. Your description should leave your visitor feeling as though a failure to convert will leave them seriously missing out on something.

Do images matter for landing page optimization?

Your landing page should not be crowded, but there generally should be at least one image that helps people visualize your offer. Some brands find that images which describe their offer, such as a picture of a book for an ebook, work well. Otherwise, images of customers using your product and looking satisfied are also good choices. The rule is to find images that complement your offer and make it look more intriguing.

How can I improve my landing page SEO performance?

Creating strong landing page optimization requires regular testing. You will need to run numerous A/B tests to optimize your content. Test the way you phrase your offer, the position and size of the image, different colors and nearly any other content feature you can imagine. Modifying even the slightest details can result in an increase in conversions, which will then provide you with more leads and more revenue.

Landing pages are a critical part of the site building process. As you create your page, you will need to pay close attention to the content elements you use. Continually test your selections to make sure that your audience is responding to the choices you have made.

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What is Content Marketing, exactly?

Content marketing is the creation and dissemination of branded digital content (online material). It differs from public relations and sales in that it does not overtly promote the brand or its products. Yet, content plays an increasingly expanded role in courting the digital consumer. Content marketing aims to identify, speak to, and stimulate the interests of target audiences. Rather than focus on products, it focuses content around consumer desires and identity. Branded content is created around clear guidelines that communicate a company’s character. Companies with clear and consistent brand mission, values, and identity are better trusted by consumers. Content-rich websites increase traffic. They provide material customized to online searches and targeted audiences.  Content marketing best practices include evaluating keywords, trending searches, and user behavior. This increases the customer base and generates marketing leads. Ultimately, this contributes to brand recognition and trust. That, in turn, leads to increased sales and a bevy of other benefits.

Why is content marketing important?

Content marketing has grown incredibly over the past few years, and this growth has been largely driven by customers themselves. An estimated 81 percent of shoppers will research things online before making a purchase. Another 94 percent of B2B customers will conduct research before buying. Other statistics reveal that 67 percent of the buyer journey now takes place digitally.

Customers today are changing. They do not depend on brands anymore to reach out to them and interest them in a product. Instead, they discover they have a problem and go out to see what solutions might exist.

As modern consumers rely increasingly on the Internet to shop and learn about products and services available, brands that do not make the jump to content marketing will be lost in the shuffle.

Who is my target audience?

To successfully run a content marketing campaign, you must first be able to clearly articulate with whom exactly you are speaking. It does not do any good to write what you find interesting, it only matters what your customer wants to read. To know what interests your customers, you must know who they are.

Develop target personas for your audience. This should be basic classifications of your buyers. Use information from past buyers as well as market research to identify three to five types of buyers that are most likely to make a purchase from your brand. Focus on answering questions such as:

• their role in their organization
• their budget
• their reason for needing this item
• the size of their company

This will give you insight into their pain points and what drove them to convert and use your company.

If you do not know the answer to these types of questions, interview your past customers and gain the information you need.

Once you know who you are speaking with, you then need to use this information for keyword research and to find topics most likely to resonate with each persona at each stage of the buyer journey.

How do I create a distribution network?

Now that your content has been developed, you need to focus on getting it in front of the intended audience. Use the information from your buyer personas and determine the platforms they are most likely to employ.

You want to use your content as a means of engaging with your audience. Since the culture and audience generally differs slightly between platforms, it is important to know where the intended audience for a particular piece likes to socialize, and use that platform as your main distribution point and the others as supplements. This will increase your odds of engaging with the right audience.

The Benefits of Content Marketing

Content marketing is distinct from advertising campaigns in that it plays a long game. Its goal is not a specific revenue boost for a product. Your SEO tools provides invaluable insight into what users want. From those keywords and searches, providing quality content will capture the ongoing attention of increased traffic. Content marketing:

• Increases brand visibility and positions brand as a dependable authority.
• Generates more inbound traffic by catering to target audience interests and improves lead generation.
• Content rich websites make visitors more likely to purchase products by keeping them within site. Strategically create links that continue or augment the visitor’s journey.
• Audience-oriented content increases engagement, sharing, and return visits and opens communication with audience and proxy audiences
• Improves brand recognition and deepens familiarity with brand identity (values, mission, and purpose) for a lasting consumer base consumer trust and identification
• Ensures brand and content consistency across platforms, products, departments, and campaigns
• Soft touch points avoid expensive and off-putting hard pitches
• Grows exponentially, providing the framework for organic growth

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1. Carefully choose queries your audience uses to look for your product or service.
2. Create high quality content around your target personas.
3. SEO-optimize your content.
4. Measure results.

Why is it important to focus on organic traffic for conversions?

According to our own research here at BrightEdge, an estimated 51 percent of your website traffic is due to organic search. This information is mirrored by studies which have found that an estimated 94 percent of B2B buyers conduct research online before making a purchase. In other words, people who are most interested in making purchases often start by doing research online. Focusing on providing better quality content for those arrive through organic searches can have an enormous impact on your bottom line.

Organic Traffic Channel Performance Graph in BrightEdge Story Builder

How can I improve my SEO traffic?

For your website to turn a new visitor who arrives from an organic search query into a customer, you need to begin by providing content that adds immediate value. These new visitors might not be familiar with your brand or company personally. Even if they have heard of your brand, they likely have not purchased from you before. Your content needs to make your value clear. It needs to encourage your customers to read more and learn what you have to offer.

How do I increase organic traffic to my website?

1. Start by understanding your buyer personas. This will give you information on of the type of person that you are marketing to and what matters most to them in their purchasing decisions.
2. Map these personas to their buyer’s journey so that you can identify the type of information these people are going to be most interested in throughout their journey.
3. Use data research to better understand what your customers want to read and the types of keywords that will help you get the most traffic.
4. Create high-value content that will inform and engage the reader so they know they can trust you to answer their needs.
5. Build a strong web presence so this new visitor has ample opportunities to get to know you better, such as accounts on the major social media platforms, landing pages that offer webinars or ebooks and mailing lists that will keep them updated on your brand.
6. Create personalized content for customers throughout their journey and coax them closer to the conversion point.

Organic traffic is one of the most important factors in your revenue rates. Since customers are now in control of the buying process, they are more likely to perform searches when they need a new product or service. Preparing your content to answer this need will help you grow your company and revenue.

NAP is an acronym for Name, Address, and Phone number. The NAP for your business needs to be correct and consistent when optimizing your website and online presence for local search because Google values accurate information for its users.

Why is NAP important for Local SEO?

Having correct NAP for all your listings across the internet is crucial for local SEO. Google scans all these listings when searching for information about your business. The data is stored and used when determining ranking. Incorrect information in NAP citations can lead to confusion for customers and a poor user experience.

What problems can arise if incorrect NAP listings are published?

Google values consistency in your listings. When all your listings say the same thing, Google can confidently display your contact information to customers on applicable queries. When the search engine finds discrepancies in the listings, then it is not sure of the information. Since incorrect information can lead to a poor user experience, differences in NAP between your listings can cause lower rankings.

A study was conducted by Wesley Young to see how much different factors impacted local search performance. He found that that consistency of the NAP could impact a site’s performance by as much as 16 percent.

How do I create NAP SEO?

1. Make sure this critical information is displayed prominently on your website so that it can be easily read by your customers and by Google. Make sure the information is text and not an image so that Google can scan the information.
2. Claim your Google My Business listings and make sure to update it with the correct NAP information.
3. Use Google to uncover potentially incorrect listings. You can use Google site operators, such as site:yelp.com “my business” to search specific directories or you can search for your phone number, address, or business name.
4. Use a resource, like this compilation of important listing sites, to get started correcting incorrect listings.
5. Keep a record of all your listings so you can quickly correct this information if you ever change your business’ phone number or address.

NAP can have an enormous impact on businesses because it gives customers easy access to the most critical information about your brand. Take the time to make sure your listings are accurate to avoid potential problems in local SERPs.

The Knowledge Graph is the mechanism that helps the Google algorithm understand how different people, places, and things are connected. When a user enters a query into Google, the Knowledge Graph gathers information, finds the best sources and presents snippets of content in informational boxes, known as Quick Answers, above the search results. Quick Answers are a way Google easily and conveniently presents information or answers to questions that are 'how to' or 'what is' oriented.

For instance, if you ask “When was the wife of Lincoln born?”, Knowledge Graph is responsible for giving the answer: “Mary Todd Lincoln, December 13, 1818”. Even though you did not mention Mary Todd Lincoln’s name, the algorithm understood that Lincoln meant Abe Lincoln and that his wife was Mary Todd. The graph mechanism was launched in May 2012, reportedly expanded in 2015, and now is included in about 1 in 5 searches.

How has the Knowledge Graph impacted search?

The Knowledge Graph has impacted SEO for businesses and websites in three main ways. Some sites saw a decline in traffic when this new feature was launched. Wikipedia reported a 21 percent decline in page views after it went live.

It complies Quick Answers at the top of SERP for how-to questions and definition queries. In these instances, the Knowledge Graph interprets information from authoritative websites and offers answers to the query in a white box at the top of the search engine results. Many marketers fear that Quick Answers reduce the need for potential customers to click on results. However, it is likely that any traffic Google siphons through the Knowledge Graph were visitors who just wanted a quick answer and would have exited the page after finding this answer. In other words, these users were not likely to convert.

Another area of significant impact has been the creation of sidebar panels, which exist for nearly every business, from major corporations to small businesses. These panels show up in response to a branded query, and they offer quite a bit of information about your brand. The panel often includes a summary, optimized photos, reviews, social profiles, competitors, and even stock prices for applicable brands.

How does the Knowledge Graph work?

1. Consider the queries that will result in Quick Answers for your industry, such as ‘how to’s’ and ‘what is’ questions. Create content that answers the question sufficiently to improve your odds of being picked as the authoritative source for the answer. Answer customer questions in clear and easy-to-digest ways. Monitor the impage of Google's Quick Answers in terms of traffic and click-through rates. You may see a clear increase for some chosen as an answer. This can boost trust for those scanning the SERP.
2. The people who want more in-depth replies, the ones more likely to convert, are likely to scroll past these Quick Answers to the results below. Optimize your content to keep your site as highly ranked as possible. You can do this with several SEO best practices including optimizing image alt text, title tags, increasing keyword density, adding backlinks, and so much more. Become a master in SEO to increase your chances of being seen by the Knowledge Graph and becoming a Quick Answer.
3. Make sure that all the information about your business in the sidebar panel is accurate. Customers trust the information found here. Focus on cultivating positive reviews on Google+, uploading engaging pictures and building a strong social media presence. This will create a positive image for your brand, improving your odds of conversion.

The Knowledge Graph helps users find the information they seek quickly and easily. Marketers can use this feature to their advantage by optimizing their content and writing new content targeting Quick Answers.

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How do SEO and PPC impact each other for online advertising?

In many organizations, the paid search team that runs PPC campaigns and the SEO team that focuses on organic search are completely separate departments. They run parallel to each other, even sometimes competing with one another. In truth, however, research run by Google itself has found that these two work together.

There have been multiple studies that have demonstrated that SEO impacts how many clicks PPC ads receive. Google has found that when a site has strong organic search results, they will increase their click-through rate for their PPC ads on the same SERP. Another study found that the phenomenon can also work in reverse-- paid search can also boost the results of organic campaigns.

How do I use organic and PPC together for search marketing?

To take advantage of the organic search and PPC connection, you need to bring your two teams together so that they understand how to work towards a common goal. For example, if you want to increase exposure for your organic keywords that do not rank very highly, you can design a campaign like this:

1. Bring your organic and your paid search teams together and have them set goals for this integrated campaign
2. Focus on bringing together organic search efforts that have high search volume, but a page ranking between 4 and 10 with PPC keywords for which you generally perform well. If you are a BrightEdge user, you can accomplish this by going to the “Reports” tab on your BrightEdge platform and filtering your keywords for “Ranked on Page 1” for your PPC campaigns and “ranked on Page 4 to 10” for your organic keywords.
3. Develop a campaign that emphasizes the exposure of both sets of keywords. On BrightEdge, you can use your dashboard to track traffic from your organic keywords with previously little exposure and the success of your PPC campaign.
4. Throughout your campaign, continue to monitor how well your keywords are performing as well as the progress of your competitors. This will help alert you to new potential keywords that can be used and potential holes in your own campaigns.

The link between organic SEO and paid search campaigns is just another way to demonstrate that a successful marketing department today cannot be siloed. Bring your teams together and see how this link can be put to work for you.