Making Social Media Work for Your Insurance Brokerage – Part Three

Last week we started to examine the metrics you’ll want to use to measure the success of your social media campaigns. We began with “interaction” which is often used as part of a bigger umbrella; “engagement”. All social media metrics of value have something to do with the engagement of your followers with your brand. Let’s take a look at some of the other important metrics to keep in mind when designing a social media campaign:

Reach

We said that followers aren’t necessarily a good thing partly because so many “likes” come from dummy accounts. However, measuring your reach is useful.

You calculate your reach by including not just those who “like” your page but by including all the people who are connected to those people too.

For example your social media data might look like this;

Total “Likes” – 500,000

Friends of Friends – 150,000,000

People Talking About You – 10,000

Weekly Total Reach – 12,500,000

In this instance your reach is the number of people who may (or may not) have seen your content in the past week. That number will usually include all the paid advertising on a channel too.

You can use these numbers to give a rough engagement score too.

We use this formula: People Talking About You/Weekly Total Reach x 100

Using the numbers above we can see: 10,000/12,500,000 x 100 = 0.08%

One of the aims of your social media campaign should be to ensure that this number is constantly rising.

Referral Traffic

Insurance Broker's Shining StarYou’ll need to ensure that your website has some form of analytical tool installed to track this. We recommend Google Analytics for a free tool but there are plenty of other paid for options that do an equally good job.

With this tool you’re looking for sources of referral. Which websites are sending you the most traffic? More importantly which websites are sending you traffic that spends time on your website? You’re looking for the “time spent on site” and “bounce rate” statistics. The higher the time and the lower the bounce rate the better. (Bounce rate is the rate at which visitors leave within the first few seconds of arriving on your site).

Of course Referral Traffic is something you want to track regarding all your online activity, not just for social media – how else can you tell whether your brand is becoming a shining star online or not?

Share of Voice

This is a competitor analysis technique. You know people are talking about you from your other metrics but are they talking about you as much as they’re talking about your opposition? There’s a simple formula to calculate this:

Share of Voice = Your Brand’s Mentions/Total Mentions for all Brands in Competing Fields x 100

You can find out this data easily using free tools such as SocialMention or you can pay for more detailed data using tools like Radian6.

Influence

We’ll be honest tracking influence is still a relatively new art form but that’s not to say you shouldn’t do it. Tools like Klout offer you the chance to find out how your company is really perceived and allow you to target where you believe your brand would be best positioned. You can find out where your nearest competitors rank for influence too.

These are our key metrics for social media. Insurance brokers looking to drive sales rather than “likes” need to examine whether they are monitoring the right metrics. Once you’ve decided on the metrics that are most likely to drive your business – then you’re ready to start investing in social media marketing and we’ll look at some of the basics for that in the next part of our series.

 

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