#Socialmedia metrics: Trashing “vanity metrics”, embracing engagement and behavioural change indicators #UNMetrics

In this month’s blogpost, I’m reaching out to the community to see if we can brainstorm to find relevant and meaningful indicators to assess the impact of our social media efforts.

We all know that in the development space, our success is measured by the impact we have on people’s lives. If you are an economist, you probably measure this in terms of income; if you are a sociologist you measure it in terms of well-being of a household; if you are a governance expert, you measure the effectiveness of institutions; and if you practice sustainable development, you measure all of the above and more.

Throughout my social media journey, I’ve been struggling to find a meaningful way of showing the impact of development-related social media efforts.

I’m not fully convinced that number of fans/followers, number of mentions; number of retweets and/or social shares tell the full impact story.

I consider the above as quantitative indicators – or what others call “vanity metrics”. These are not hard core engagement indicators. They do not shed light on behavioural change nor do they show the action of the user on any given piece of content.

Maybe there are folks out there who have cracked this nut. If so, please share your insights.

Bearing in mind that we can never get away from metrics, I would love to hear from our very own community whether the following indicators could help us have a better picture of the impact of our social media efforts:

• how are the influencers in our field engaging with our content
• are our followers taking action and/or inquiring about our work as a result of “reading” and “interacting” with our content
• how are our followers curating our content
• how is our audience complementing our content to generate new knowledge
• how is our audience advocating on our behalf and/or advocating our cause
• what is the evidence of behaviour change as a result of interacting and engaging with our content
• who is providing salient, substantive and constructive comment, thus sparking new conversations
• is the community raising issues and pushing us out of our comfort zone
• what is the quality of original content we’re producing to respond to our follower’s needs and request

I am sure our collective wisdom and experience can help us crack this nut. So please, share your ideas and input. Let’s try and come up with a set of comprehensive indicators which really measure engagement and behaviour change.

To share your thoughts all you need to do is tweet with the #UNmetrics

Looking forward to your insights. Until then goodbye…..

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I am writing a series of guest blogs for @unsocial500 on how to boost engagement on social media. The purpose of the series is to share best practices and tips. The above blogpost first appeared on UN Social 500 site. If there is a specific topic you want more information and guidance on, please let me know so that I can put it in the pipeline :)