Measuring Your Social Media Exposure

It's all well and great to be active online, but simply having a lot of likes, followers and friends isn't always the true gauge of your presence. That's why it's important to be able to more closely measure your true social media exposure. Luckily, there are now multiple ways to do this, as evidenced in this excerpt from the 2nd edition of the Music 3.0: A Survival Guide For Making Music In The Internet Age. This excerpt comes from Chapter 8 on "Social Media Management."

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"How many people have you reached with your message? How many could you have reached? In social media, there are some measurements about as reliable as a print magazine’s circulation, but knowing your potential audience does have value because it represents your potential sales lead pool.

Unfortunately, as of the writing of this book, some of these metrics have to be accounted for manually, so you’ll have to balance the level of effort to track the metrics versus the value you’ll receive from them to determine their importance to your overall strategy.

A good example of where there can be unreliability in social measurement is when isolating unique users for each of your metrics. You want to avoid counting the same person twice in the list below, but realistically it’s difficult to do.

These measurements highlight the number of people you’ve attracted to your brand through social media. To mitigate the potential for duplication of users, track growth rate as a percentage of the aggregate totals. This is where you will find the real diamonds.

• Twitter: Look at your number of followers and the number of followers for those who retweeted your message to determine the monthly potential reach. You should track these separately and then compare the month-over-month growth rate of each of these metrics so you can determine where you’re seeing the most growth. A great free tool to use for Twitter measurement is TweetReach.

• Facebook: Track the total number of fans for your brand page. In addition, review the number of friends from those who became fans during a specified period of time or during a promotion and those who commented on or liked your posts to identify the potential monthly Facebook reach. Facebook Insights provides value here.

• YouTube: Measure the number of views for videos tied to a promotion or specific period of time, such as monthly, and the total number of subscribers.

• Blog: Measure the number of visitors who viewed the posts tied to the promotion or a specific period of time.

• Email: Take a look at how many people are on the distribution list and how many actually received the email.

Social Media Measurement Tools
Measuring just how successful an artist’s promotional campaign is (the artist’s buzz) and all the data that surrounds an artist is a top issue for M3.0. This was impossible in M1.0 and 1.5, somewhat available in M2.0, but now much more widely available and easier than ever to use in M3.0. With so many new avenues available for music discovery and promotion, knowing where the buzz is coming from and how to utilize it is more an issue than ever.

Here are nine tools to help track your buzz:

Band Metrics (bandmetrics.com) - band and song tracking
Google Alerts (google.com/alerts) - Sweeps the web and delivers buzz to your inbox.
Twitter Search (search.twitter.com) - Track your buzz on this popular micro-blogging service.
Who’s Talkin (whostalkin.com) - Social media search.
Stat Counter (statcounter.com) - statistics about who visits your site and blog
Tynt Tracer (tcr1.tynt.com) - traces images and text that’s been copied off your site.
Next Big Sound (nextbigsound.com) - shows the number of new fans, plays, views and comments
Music Metric (musicmetric.com) - provides social network tracking, P2P network analysis, radio and sales data, and fan demographics.
RockDex (rockdex.com) - collects data from blog posts, fan connections, pageviews, tweets, song plays, and spots viral trends and tracks progress over time."

You can read more excerpts from Music 3.0 and my other books on my website.

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