Monitoring & Analyzing Social Media

Top 3 Metrics for Building a Brand Online

I saw this question on Twitter:

If you’re trying to build a brand online, what are the top 3 metrics you’d use?

It’s a great question. Building brand is an ongoing process & establishing metrics prove that you’re making progress. I’ve been building corporate brands & my own brand since 2006 and it’s easier than ever now. Back in those days I had to do the social media monitoring part manually. Today we have tools like Techrigy SM2 that aggregates my old routine.

There are two key components to building brand: web analytics & social media monitoring.

• web analytics are important for your brand’s site & blog
• social media monitoring provides insight into the conversation about your brand on the web at large

The first step is to benchmark:

• for web analytics
  • number of visitors per day
  • average time per page
  • ratio of comments per post for a blog
• for social media monitoring
  • number of mentions on average per week or month
  • sentiment
  • percentage of mentions by influentials

The goals can then be established. The rate at which the brand building will happen is dependent on the amount of resources (people & time) invested. The metrics will help drive the process in building brand awareness & provide easy tracking of the progress.

For web analytics there are tools such as Google analytics or Feedburner. They are free & straightforward to use. Building brand is addictive. I tend to be in Feedburner most every day.

For social media monitoring there are many free tools. We have the Freemium version of Techrigy SM2 (as well as a professional version). It monitors a broad range of sources such as blogs, Twitter, forums, etc. And it automatically determines sentiment offering a quick overview of the public’s perception.

SM2 also displays the results based on influence so that you can efficiently reach out to them.

There shouldn’t be any mystery around metrics and building brand. The metrics will motivate those involved because they can easily see their progress! (and as I said earlier, it’s a bit addictive!)

Metrics are the first step. Then the process is the next step but it’s structured by the metrics. I have written a number of posts on building brand. 

What metrics do you use in your brand building efforts?

*we’re having a webinar on Techrigy SM2 on Tuesday - Sign up here

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