In this series of articles, I’ve been talking about what types of social media analytics my library tracks. We’ve already discussed Activity Metrics. Today we’ll cover Audience Metrics.
This is also an easy one! We monitor some really basic trends in audience growth by counting how many followers we have each month.
Again, this is an easy one to count. Simply go to each channel’s main page at the first of the month, and write down how many followers you have.
Then I do some simple math to figure out how many new followers we gained across all our social media channels.
So for example – in May, we had:
- Facebook – 12,429 followers
- Twitter – 4338 followers
- Youtube – 384 subscribers
- Pinterest – 1704 followers – on our main account page. Pinterest is weird, since they have followers for the whole Pinterest account, and followers for each individual board. We are only counting followers to the main page.
Then I look at last month’s numbers, do some more addition, and … we gained 130 social media followers in May.
Why track this?
- It shows growth over time. Not a bad thing. Sorta like a door count or basic use stats.
- It shows trends. If there’s a lot of growth, or a big drop-off, that’s a signal to find out more.
Are there other types of Audience Metrics that you track? Please share!
Image by Marc Cornelis
How do you track loss of followers? Simply comparing followers month to month doesn’t necessarily tell you if actually you got 135 new followers, but 5 people stopped following you on FB/Twitter/Pinterest/etc.
We don’t. But if you wanted to track that, you could in some cases. For example, Facebook tracks that, as does Youtube – you’d just need to keep track of it. Twitter doesn’t, but there are third party apps (like Friend or Follow) that do that. Not sure about Pinterest, etc. But hey – it’s a start!