Download your free Social media metrics dashboard

The social media metrics dashboard aims to help the people in your organisation, tasked with managing your propriety (owned) social media channels, to better understand the overall performance of owned social media channels.

Although having a lot of fans and followers looks great, there are a bunch of other metrics that matters and it can sometimes be a burdensome jungle to navigate all the metrics.

Based on my experience having worked with people managing their company’s owned social media channels I’ve developed this free to download social media metrics dashboard.

It’s a neat little MS Excel sheet that will help anyone in your organisation, tasked with engaging on your owned social media channels, better understand the performance of each channel.

With the social media metrics dashboard you’ll be able to see trends across all your social media channels.

How do I use the Social media metrics dashboard?

My social media metrics dashboard groups a set of metrics across channels into four categories:

1. Activity
2. Interaction
3. Reach
4. Subscribers.

Based on these four categories we look at KPIs such as:

1. Conversation Relevance
2. Avg. Reach per Activity
3. Subscriber Interaction.

The engine of the social media metrics dashboard is the “Data input” tab. Here you will insert your numbers for each metric that you want to measure. Unlike most social media reporting templates this one is not grouped per channel, but instead grouped per 1) Activity 2) Interaction 3) Reach 4) Subscribers.

1. Activity

The first metric group is Activity, which is the amount of things You publish on your own social media channels. Every tweet, facebook images and youtube video is one activity. If you in January, tweeted 34 times, published 3 videos, blogged twice and uploaded 21 things on facebook, then these are the numbers you put in under the correct row.

Activity metrics per channel:

• Blog posts – The combined amount of published blog posts
• Facebook posts – The combined amount of unique Facebook posts including photos, videos etc.
• Twitter Tweets – The combined amount of tweets
• Google+ Updated – The combined amount of Google+ updates including photos, videos etc.
• Youtube videos – The combined amount of uploaded Youtube videos

Weight score?

Weight score aims to level out the diferencies between each social media channel. Tweeting 34 times might take less effort than producing 2 videos. in order not to skew the the final reporting, a youtube video score could be multiplied with x10 i.e. two videos give you a 20p score which might be more in comparison with 34 tweets. You can adjust the weight score to your liking. Weight score is optional to use. If you don’t like it simply put “1″ in each cell.

2. Interaction

The second input field in the social media metrics dashboard are Interactions. This is all the actions from your subscribers i.e fans and followers. How many likes do your receive on your facebook updates and how many Re-tweets are you getting? Just as with the other metrics there’s a weight score to level out the otherwise injust differences between channels.

Interaction metrics per channel:

• Blog comments – The combined amount of comments on your published blog posts
• Blog social sharings – The combined amount of times your blog posts have been shared on social networks.
• Facebook posts – The combined amount of unique Facebook posts including photos, videos etc.
• Twitter Tweets – The combined amount of tweets
• Google+ Updated – The combined amount of Google+ updates including photos, videos etc.
• Youtube videos – The combined amount of uploaded Youtube videos

3. Reach

The third input field in the social media metrics dashboard is Reach. How many people are you touching with your activities? No one can tell for sure, but each channel has metrics trying to answer that question. We therefore call it potential reach, and together with the weight score you can achieve a fairly accurate result.

4. Subscribers

Last, you have to input your Subscribers in the social media metrics dashboard. These are simply your fans, followers, have in circles etc.

The Heartbeat tab

This is the useful part of the social media metrics dashboard, the heartbeat tells your team how they are doing. If the data input tab is properly filled in, the heartbeat tab will report on 1) Conversation Relevance 2) Avg. Reach per Activity 3) Subscriber Interaction.

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Conversation relevance

If you have launched your Facebook page you aim must be to maintain it and stay relevant. This is about producing great content that receives the wows from your fans and followers. If you constantly post stuff that no one likes or re-tweets, why even bother? The Conversation Relevance metric is a great goal setting metric for your team tasked with community management on social media sites. Work towards beating the number each month (but don’t try to fool the numbers) and you will be forced into getting creative and produce better content which is more relevant to your audience.

Content relevance is Interactions / Activity.

Avg. Reach per Activity

This is an average number of potential people reached per activity. Weight the amount of work you put into publishing on social media with how many people you actually could reach.

Subscriber Interaction

Subscriber interaction aims at measuring the level of activity within your total network. You may have a lot of fans and followers but very few are actually active. Try to beat the number each month and grow the activity within your network.

How do I analyse and read the dashboard?

The way I use the social media metrics dashboard when I help my clients is to focus on the Content Relevance metrics. This is a metric from where you easily can setup goals for your content team. Scored 0.7 in March? Let’s get that up by 10% each month forces your team to get creative and dig into how to create better and more engaging content. But don’t fool the numbers just for the sake of it, even though a “can I get 100 likes on this” may look like a one hit wonder, it won’t do any good for your business.

You’ll probably also see a distinct relationship between Interaction and Reach. The way social media networks are designed promotes content that gets Interactions, hence potentially higher Reach.

Also don’t confuse this with ROI. This report doesn’t mentioned any monetary value anywhere, it’s simply a metrics dashboard helping you to improve what you post. If that is giving you a positive ROI or not is a totally different subject where Olivier Blanchard has a great book called Social Media ROI.

Where do I find the metrics?

Most of the metrics you need for this social media metrics dashboard are available from each channel’s own reporting interface with the exception of Twitter and Google+, which yet don’t have any reporting interface. Tools such as Spredfast (expensive but awesome) and TwentyFeet (cheaper but still good) are two of my favourites to  aggregate the data from multiple channels.

• Tweetreach.com
  
• Spredfast
• TwentyFeet

I’m always happy to help you with measurement & vendor selection.

Facebook Page example:

1) Activity

Under the general menu in Facebook Insights you’ll find a graph showing reach, talking about this and posts. Simply hover over the purple circles to see how many posts you have published. Alternatively use the list just below the graph.

2) Interactions

Under talking about this, scroll down and find the bottom left graph showing number of interactions that have resulted in a news feed post. This would include content interactions such as clicks, likes, shares and comments.

3) Reach

Under reach scroll down to the bottom left graph showing organic, paid, viral and total reach. Unless you want to segment your reach data into these three categories, just untick all boxes leaving only total ticked.

4) Subscribers

The subscriber base on Facebook Pages is called likes and you’ll find this number just under your cover image.

What if I want to measure other social media channels such as Instagram?

Per default I’ve added the most common social media channels, i.e the ones you’re most likley to have such as a blog, a Facebook Page, a Google+ Page, Youtube channel and Pinterest boards.

You can of course just add a new row with another channel or replace something in the existing ones. Just remember that if you add or remove and rows in the data input sheet, you will also need to update the forumlas in the heartbeat sheet.

Need more help with Social media analytics?

With Nilsson Analytics I help my clients with social media analytics, value attribution and ROI justification. My approach is free from any hype and uses traditional GOST (Goals, objectives, strategies, tactics) methodology to understand what impacts your bottom line results.