[MUSIC] Private virtual communities and websites have unique management systems. To start our discussion of social metrics, I would like to welcome Professor Rich Gordon from the Northwestern Medill Journalism School. Welcome, Rich. >> Thanks, I'm happy to be here. >> Tell me a little bit about what you teach in the Medill school. >> Sure. I focus on digital content, digital publishing, innovation, entrepreneurship and analytics in content on the web. >> When we think about metrics and social, how do you see that? >> I think of it really in two dimensions. First, many organizations are trying to drive traffic to a website. Using social media, you would wanna look the metrics on your website to understand better where your social traffic is coming from, which social sources are sending you new visitors versus returning visitors, which social sources are sending you the most engaged users. Then, there is engagement on the social channels themselves, you want to be able to measure each of those social channels, and the various metrics that exist to understand engagement on those social channels. So we'll talk today, about tools that are available to do that. >> Let's start with the website. What sort of metrics and tools do you recommend there? Sure, the starting point is that, for most organizations these days, social media is the largest traffic driver to their site. So, you have staff on your content team or your marketing team who are focusing on social challenges and focusing on driving traffic. And in a world where there are so many different social channels, it's important to be able to set priorities. So, you can use the metrics from your website to understand the social channels, how they're driving traffic. And help you figure out where to allocate your staff's time. >> So, if I'm a startup or I'm kinda new to this, what sort of metric systems are there? And how do I get those, onto my website? >> There a variety of tools available to measure traffic and engagement on your site, most of them are what I would call web analytic software. The most popular of those is Google Analytics. It's free and provided by Google. In China, there is a very similar product called, By Do Analytics. And then, there are enterprise software products that are more expensive, such as Omniture from Adobe's site catalyst software. They all work pretty much the same way. The site administrator puts a piece of code on to every page on the site. The code runs when the page is opened, generating data and the analytics system, make sense out of that data and delivers it to your authorized users via a web interface. >> So, what sort of things should I be measuring on my website, relative to social? >> I'll use Google Analytics as an example. In Google Analytics, there is an area that is about referrals to the site, which is basically where the traffic is coming from. Within that, there are the social referrals. And if you drill into that, you can see actually, which social channels are sending you users, and what they're doing when they get there. >> I can essentially go across the social pyramid and say, these people are coming from YouTube. These people are coming from blogs. These people are coming from other activity. So, I could really get into, what are the sites giving me with my website as the destination?. >> Exactly. So for starters, you might just like to know which social channels are sending you the most traffic. You could, for instance, see that Facebook is generating sincerely more traffic than Twitter in US sites. Once you know, how many people are coming. The analytic system can also tell you, whether those users are new visitors that you have not seen before or returning visitors who are coming to the site, for the first time. And depending on your goals for organization, either of those may be a priority and maybe that you want to bring people back who've been there before. And maybe that you're looking to increase your reach and find users who have not been to the site before. And in Google Analytics, there's a measure of new sessions. The percentage of new sessions is the percentage of visits that comes from people who have not been there before, not recognized before. And the remainder are returning visitors. Beyond that, you may actually want to understand which social channels are sending you the most engaged visitors. There are a number of measures you could use, to measure engagement. The one that I think is the most useful is pages per session, which simply says, once they come to my site, they will view on page. Is probably your goal as a publisher, or a brand that is running the site, to get them to visit more than one page. And you wanna organize your site, so that when they're looking at one piece of content, that there are other options available to them. And if they visit a second page, that's good. Third page is even better. And page's procession is an average of all visitors to the site, and you can break that down based on where they came from. Whether they came from Facebook or Twitter or Tumblr, etcetera. >> So with analytics tools, I cannot only look at where they're coming from. I can identify the new, versus the people that have been there before. And then, I could look at their journey on my website. >> Exactly. >> That's fantastic. So on social, what else might we want to measure? >> You wanna look at two general categories of things. First, you want to understand which social channels are driving you the kind of engagement you want on your site. You can do this, by looking at your website analytics. To understand how those social channels are interacting with your site and how those users, once they come from social, do things on your site. Beyond that, you have some decisions to make as an organization about what to do on these social channels and the metric systems give you the ability to measure, for instance, what kinds of content get the most engagement, which social channels are the most valuable for your organization. But, you can go a lot more specifically than that. For instance, you might want to know which days of the week, or which times of the day are the best times to post. And you can measure that with these social analytics. In general, I think that the strategy that you want to have is to experiment. The approach you wanna have is to experiment. And you want to use. You wanna make some hypotheses, do something things like social channels and then, measure with the data to figure out whether those things worked or not. For instance, you might want to experiment on Twitter with, whether adding hashtags or more hashtags is helping spread the content more widely and get more engagement. What you should do is have a strategy, where you going for a period time, add more hashtags to your tweets and then come back and measure using both your web analytics and your social analytics to see whether that has worked. If it has, you might do more of it. And if it hasn't, you might try something else. And that's really the beauty of these systems is given the amount of data that's available to you, the ease with which you can access it, you can do experiments and test your hypotheses. >> And the neat part is, we can do that for free. These are our free tools that we can build into our website, as well as use on the social sites to make all that happen. >> That's exactly right. >> Thanks so much for these great insights, Rich. >> You're quite welcome. It's a pleasure being here. [MUSIC]
