You have your Tweeps (Twitter followers), your Likers (Facebook fans), your MySpace Friends, Diggs, Pings, Stumbles, Reddits, Delicious bookmarks, YouTube and Vevo views, etc., etc. All of this social media connecting is really awesome, but what does it mean for you as an artist?

Social media has earned a spot in all artists’ marketing campaigns because they can connect directly with fans, but the metrics to measure success are still in their infancy.

There a couple of different ways to look at analyzing social media; first, how it is building your overall brand, and second, the actual sales or conversions being generated. In this post we’ll explore both so you can see exactly what specific social media sites including Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc., are doing to sell your stuff.

The first is a little abstract, but goes hand in hand with growing your fan base and converting new fans in purchasers. The branding element includes metrics like reach and sentiment. When more folks engage with and talk about your band, the more opportunities you will have to gain new followers.

10 Metrics to Measure your brand with Social Media

1. Authority: This measures the amount of times you’ve been retweeted, reblogged, reposted.

2. Frequency: How often do you message your audience? Timing your messaging is important. Do you get more engagement during the evening or in the morning?

3. Text patterns: Mine through the text of your social media updates. There might be patterns in the way you speak to your audience that trigger more reaction.

4. Reach: The reach identifies the total number of unique social media users who received your updates. You can analyze with free tools: tweetreach.com, backtype.com and youropenbook.org.

5. Influencers: These are the folks talking about your band. Looking at the follower count is a basic way to determine this.

6. Sentiment: Listen to positive, neutral, and negative comments. Address negative comments and engage the sender. Taking the time to interact can go a long way.

7. Total clicks: Content is often shared based on headlines; these influence clicks and analyzing can help build better titles. The URL shortener bit.ly has a great analytic platform.

8. Overall mentions: Record the number of times your act is mentioned online with the aim to grow these conversations by providing your fans with sharable content. More conversations means more viewers. Google Alerts and Twitter Search are great, free, real-time tools that enable you to listen to your audience.

9. Content, and competitive content analysis: What type of content gets the most engagement?  Is it YouTube videos or blog posts? Compare your content strategy with other like minded bands to see what is valuable to publish.

10. Influence: Your number of followers per social platform. This is mainly a trending metric to gauge popularity.

Analytics to Track Sales From Social Media

Artists might have sent a Facebook update about a new release to 15,000 fans and wondered how many of these folks picked up the album. Let’s look at a more scientific way that will tell you exactly what social media is doing to sell the stuff on your website. For this you’ll need to use your web analysis tool. Google Analytics (GA) was used in this example.

There are 3 things you’ll need to do to get set up: establish a goal, set up a funnel, then create a custom report. By following these steps you’ll be able to track what social media site a visitor came from, and if that visitor signed up for something like an email newsletter, or purchased an album or t-shirt.

1. Establish a Goal: A goal is a webpage that signals a conversion, an action taken on your website. It can be a visit to your “about us” page, a “thank you” pop-up page from an email newsletter sign up, or a “thank you” pop-up page from a t-shirt purchase. To set up the goal, go to your GA home page and hit “edit.” Next, under “Goals (set1)” click “+ Add Goal.” You’ll see a screen that looks like this:

Give your goal a name so you can find it easily in your reports. My example name is “Email Conversion.”
Leave the “Active Goal” on and “Goal Position” Set 1, Goal 1.

Under “Goal Type” choose “URL Destination.”

Under the “Match Type” choose “Exact Match”

Input your URL for the goal page without your domain into the “Goal URL” section. For example, for the goal page “http://www.mysite.com/thankyou.html” enter “/thankyou.html”

If you’d like, you can enter a Goal Value. I put $50 for the value of an email newsletter sign up, assuming fans will purchase this amount of merch as a result of signing up for the emails.

Click “Save Goal” at the bottom of the page.

2. Set up a Funnel: A funnel is the path that consumers need to take on your website to complete a goal. To get to an email newsletter sign up, for example, consumers might need to go through multiple pages. List those pages in the funnel, just below the “Goals” section. Again, the URLs should not contain the domain name.

In your GA dashboard you can click on “Goals” to see your conversions (data can take up to 24 hours to register). Now let’s make a custom report.

Almost done…promise!

3. Create a Custom Report: Under “Goals” in your GA dashboard there is “Custom Reporting.” Click that button, then “Manage Custom Reports.” Hit “Create new custom report.”

Under the blue “Metrics” tab drag and drop “Goal1 Completions” and “Goal 1 Conversion Rate” into the blue metric boxes on the right side of the page.

Then, under the green “Dimensions” tab drag and drop “Source” and “Referral Path” into the green dimensions boxes. This will define all traffic sources so you can see what social media sites sent traffic to your website and picked up your stuff.

Finally, click “Save Report.” You’re done.

To view your reports go to “Custom Reporting” on your GA dashboard and click on your report. Analyze daily to maximize

Now when you send out a Tweet to let fans know new T-shirts are available, you don’t have to wonder if Twitter helped sales; you can turn to your custom reports and find out for sure. Happy analyzing.