Zarrar Chishti - Gamification Marketing For Dummies

If your company has created a Facebook Business page (and if you haven’t, get on that!), you can analyze some key data metrics within the social network’s channel, as shown in Figure 3-2:

Engagement: The number of likes, clicks, and shares your posts have generated. One useful feature allows you to compare metrics from one week with metrics from another week.

Post Reach: The number of people who have seen any of your content.

Impressions: The number of times your company’s page is displayed.

Organic Page Likes: The number of people who like your page without coming from an ad campaign. This metric highlights the total amount of likes, as well as the number of new page likes on a week-by-week basis. It also helps you understand if your Facebook presence is growing at a healthy rate.

Paid Likes: The number of people who have liked your page who came from your ad campaign.

Reactions: The number of people who have engaged with your posts by using the various Facebook reaction emojis.

Unlikes: The number of people who unliked your Facebook page this week. If this metric ever spikes, it’s worth investigating the reason, such as a controversial post.

FIGURE 3-2:Facebook Insights offers a wealth of audience metric data for you to analyze.

Instagram Insights provides in-depth key data metrics broken down into two sections — one focused on your individual posts and the other on your profile as a whole. Here are some of the key data metrics to capture:

Account Impressions: The number of times your posts and stories were viewed

Total Reach: How many unique accounts have viewed your posts and stories

Website Clicks: The number of people who have clicked the website URL in your profile

Profile Visits: The number of people who have clicked to view your account page

Post Likes: The number of likes your posts have received

Post Comments: The number of comments accumulated on any given post

Posts Saved: The number of times your posts have been saved

Follows: The number of people who have started following you over a period of time

Twitter for Business allows you to have in-depth data access to your analytics, as shown in Figure 3-3. The dashboard gives you a summary of your content and other key data. Here are some of the key metrics to analyze:

Engagement Rate: A whole array of data, including link clicks, retweets, favorites. and replies to your tweets

Followers: The total number of Twitter followers your company has gained, with the ability to compare the rates over a period of time

Link Clicks: The total number of people who have clicked the website URL in your profile

Mentions: The number of times your username was mentioned by others

Profile Visits: The number of people who have visited your Twitter profile

Replies: The number of times your tweets received replies

Retweets: The number of retweets received by others with a date comparison features

Tweet Impressions: The number of times your tweets have been viewed, whether they were engaged with or not

You can access LinkedIn Analytics through your company page, which shows you all the social media data going into your LinkedIn page. Here are the top metrics to look out for:

Interactions: The number of comments, likes, and shares your posts and overall company profile have received over a period of time

Clicks: The number of clicks on your posts and on your company page

Engagement: The number of interactions compared to the number of impressions FIGURE 3-3:Twitter Analytics helps you break down your key data to help you understand which types of posts resonate with your audience.

Followers: The number of new followers, which includes any that came through a sponsored post

Impressions: The number of times your posts were visible to other LinkedIn users

It’s easy to get carried away with metrics without really understanding what they mean in context. In other words, it’s just as important to analyze your data as it is to collect it.

I, too, am guilty of becoming obsessed with vanity metrics (any social media metrics that make your company’s presence look good but do very little in terms of engagement), such as follower counts and likes. The fact is, the data from vanity metrics can’t help you measure your company’s past and current performance in a way that allows you to create a strategy for your gamification marketing campaign. These data points can look impressive when you’re looking at them on a report. But, unfortunately, they may mean very little without some context.

Your company having thousands of followers will mean very little if those same followers aren’t translating into sales. Similarly, it’s pointless posting interesting news and content if the majority of your followers fail to engage with it.

Not all is lost, though. There must be a reason for your company to have gained all these followers. The cause may have been a popular hashtag you used or created in the past or it may have been a popular post or article. By identifying the reasons for the followers you have, you can use the same tactics in your marketing campaign’s launch strategy.

Vanity metrics are ultimately useless because they’re too easy to measure and contain no context. This can mean they’re often misleading and, more important, don’t really help your gamification marketing campaign in any meaningful way. They look impressive, but sadly, they’re devoid of substance.

Sure, go ahead and take pride in your earned metrics. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with sharing this data to demonstrate how well your company is doing online. But just know that the data can’t be used as evidence for your campaign. Best to leave it for website headlines and press releases.

Arguably any of your social media data can be a vanity metric. The good news is: You can identify which metrics are meaningless. The central question to ask yourself when considering a metric is whether it will help your business achieve its goals. Here are three questions you can ask yourself to identify vanity metrics:

Can you make meaningful decisions for your gamification marketing campaign using this metric? Dismiss the metric if your answer is “no.”Actionable metrics can help you make decisions for your campaign. This is because the data provides meaningful feedback and context for what your campaign should be doing and whether it has a chance of working.Smart data can also help you adjust your campaign strategies so that the campaign attracts a bigger audience. Any social media data you collect should help make your campaign’s launch better.

Can you reproduce the results? Any social media data that was produced as a random occurrence will not be helpful to your campaign. When it comes to viral posts in social media, lightning rarely strikes twice unless you can identify a cause and effect within the data.Make sure the metrics have been reproduced more than once. If you can’t reproduce a statistically similar metric, then you can’t use it to improve your campaign. This means that although the metric looks great, the data and knowledge behind it won’t do anything to help your campaign.