How Do You Track Social Media Engagement?

Tracking the effectiveness of a social media campaign is challenging, yet critical. It's easy to see how big of an audience you've attracted by simply looking at how many followers, fans or blog post views you've accumulated.

But is your amassed audience actually listening? How much of your audience is actively participating in your conversation?

"Engagement" is defined differently according to the particular goals of each social media campaign, but here are a few general suggestions to think about. This is by no means a comprehensive list, but hopefully it will get you thinking of different ways to track the effectiveness of your social media efforts.

Blogs

• Comment to View Ratio: Divide the number of comments your latest post received by the number of views. Focus on increasing the percentage of viewers who are compelled to leave a comment.
• Trackbacks:  Trackbacks are a way of monitoring who is linking to your blog post. For a full explanation check out this Wikipedia entry. If your post is being linked to by a bunch of other bloggers, your content has been deemed useful.
• Drill into Analytics: Dive deep into your analytics tool. Is there a traffic spike from Facebook? Someone probably posted your blogpost there, an indication of engagement.

Twitter

• Clickthroughs: Some URL shorteners will track how many times your Tweeted link has been clicked. I use BudURL, which offers a bunch of statistics. This definitely helps you track active engaging.
• Responses to Questions: How many answers do you get from questions you pose on Twitter? This is very subjective, maybe your questions are very niche. Still though, conversation is two-way, so how many responses you get is much more indicative of participation than followers.
• Retweets: This is when one of your followers forwards your tweet to their followers. It looks like: RT@seanoakley. An easy way to track is just use twitter’s search, and enter RT@yourprofile.

Again, certainly not a comprehensive list. But hopefully it's given  you a few ideas on how to track engagement. Of course, once we've figured out how to track audience participation, the real goal is to increase it. I'll save that for a later post.

Have a way of tracking engagement I didn't mention above? We'd love to hear your thoughts, please leave a comment.

Photo Credit: Tim Morgan on Flickr