Why Leading Metrics Are A Social Media Marketer’s Secret Weapon

Social media marketers have an ever-growing slew of platforms at their disposal.

After all, it’s not just millennials who are social media-obsessed. According to the Pew Internet Project, the percentages of online U.S. adults who use Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, and Twitter have steadily risen over the past few years alone.

In fact, 74% of online adults use social networking sites, and 52% of online adults now use two or more social media sites, a significant increase from 2013, when it stood at 42% of internet users.

While the broad range of demographics available on social media bodes well for marketers…. there are lots of social platforms out there, and lots of content to compete with. So how can a marketer definitively determine which content works best on which channels? That’s where leading metrics come in.

First, a refresher on Leading Metrics…

Marketers have a plethora of metrics and KPIs at their disposal, from clicks and conversions to sales pipeline contribution. Leading metrics is an umbrella term for the metrics that measure initial audience engagement with your content.

Luckily for social media marketers, each social media platform has its own native metrics for measuring audience engagement with content. Some examples of leading metrics include:

• Likes, Shares, Comments, and Page Likes (Facebook)
• Favorites, Retweets, Mentions, and Followers (Twitter)
• Video Views, Comments, and Subscribers (YouTube)
• Likes, Comments, and Followers (Instagram)
• Notes (Tumblr)
• Likes, Comments, and Followers (LinkedIn)
• +1s, Shares, and Followers (Google+)

What do all of these metrics have in common? They indicate what your audience actually cares about. People vote with their clicks, swipes, double-taps, likes, and shares online. Leading metrics offer a way for marketers to identify the topics and content types that are most engaging to their brand’s audience.

So why are Leading Metrics a social media marketer’s secret weapon?

1. Leading metrics let you evaluate your content right away.

For any content marketer trying to be heard amongst the explosion of digital channels, the ability to see around the content corner is a massive competitive advantage. Leading metrics serve as a litmus test for your content marketing.

Let’s say your brand launches a new campaign, and as the social media lead, it’s your job to execute and disseminate the campaign across the right social platforms. By looking to leading metrics, you can track immediate audience engagement with your the campaign content.

Are certain topics or types of content taking off with your audience within the hour? Within the day?Are posts with the campaign hashtag trending? Track these metrics, and you’ll be able to tinker with your distribution strategy to make sure you get the most out of the campaign.

Or think of it this another way… Remember when #TheDress was all anyone could talk about? While many brands were quick to jump on the #TheDress bandwagon, leading metrics from our platform quickly illustrated that this trending topic feel flat with some audiences…

2. Leading Metrics can be optimized daily.

Leveraging leading metrics means looking at engagement as you go — not waiting weeks or months to pull up and see which content sticks and which falls flat. At TrackMaven, we’ve seen the most effective marketers iterate their way to success. If you’re waiting until the end of the month or end of the quarter to figure out which content worked and which didn’t, you’re already behind.

Let’s say you put a piece of content into marketing and it isn’t working, and your competitors sniff that out before you do. While you’re peddling the same lackluster content to your audience, your competitors have time to differentiate their brand and create something that truly resonates.

For another take on the “test and optimize” approach, read about Peter Sims’ research on the “science of little bets” here.

3. Leading Metrics can be normalized to serve as competitive benchmarks.

You might already be thinking, “My brand is active on social media, but we don’t have as many followers as some of our competitors,” or even, “Our competitors post much more often than we do, so they’re bound to see more total interactions than our brand.”

The beauty of leading metrics is that they can normalized for both follower count and posting frequency. Take a look at the comparison of Pinterest engagement for home decor retail competitors West Elm, Pottery Barn, and Anthropologie — which has a competitive house and home product line — below.

When we look only at each brand’s total interactions, Anthropologie leads the pack…

But when we compare the brands by the average interactions per pin per 1,000 followers, we’re offered a true apples-to-apples comparison of brand engagement on Pinterest. Once normalized for audience size and posting frequency, we can see that it’s actually Pottery Barn that sees the greatest engagement from its audience!

These are just a few of the ways leading metrics can improve workflow efficiency for social media marketers — but the same principles can be applied to blogs, press mentions, email, ad campaigns, and more. For more on how leading metrics can help your content cut through the noise, get your copy of our report, The Content Marketing Paradox.