What are the basic metrics available from three of the most popular social networks - Twitter, Facebook and YouTube? Let’s take a look.

1. © Heather Read Page 1 of 3
Social Media Management
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Social Media Analysis: the Basics of Twitter, Facebook and YouTube
02/14/2012
Adapted from article originally published at PRSA Philadelphia
by Heather Read
What are the basic metrics available from three of the most popular social networks? Let’s take a look.
Twitter
The main metric for Twitter – the ever-popular network that allows you to post updates to everyone or
a specific person in less than 140 characters – are posts. Other measurements include messages you’ve
sent or received; mentions, when a user mentions you in a post; or direct messages, which are sent
privately.
Once a post exists, users have the option to select Favorite, Retweet, or Reply. A favorite merely
bookmarks the post; a retweet shares the post on your own feed or timeline; and a reply is a message
specifically sent to you.
One of the most impressive features of Twitter is its ability to direct traffic to links embedded within
posts. Usually this is defined as clicks in a monitoring tool. To make sure your analytics are precise, some
social media management tools offer reports with filtered clicks, which subtract the known bots (or
inhuman clicks) from your total clicks number, giving you a more realistic number.
These metrics are what we call engagements, meaning how you have interacted with a user on the
social network. In my opinion, you can classify mentions, replies, and direct messages as “active”
engagements. Retweets, clicks, and favorites are “passive” engagements showing users’ different
intents. If you want to build an active and engaged Twitter community around a certain topic, it is more
important to have many replies and mentions that indicate you are part of a specific dialogue. In this
case, I recommend segmenting your reports to compare incoming versus outgoing replies, mentions,
and direct messages. This way you can understand how often people are attempting to engage you
versus your outbound activity. However, if your goal is to drive people to read content on a blog, what
you really want to know are how many clicks (or filtered clicks) have there been on the links you
embedded. Either way, you’ll want to compare these stats in a few ways: over a period of time, across
different message styles (pictures vs. links), and with various types of accounts (corporate news vs.
customer service).
Audience is another major Twitter metric, i.e. your followers. The total impact a message has in the
Twitter universe is measured under “reach” (the impressions or audience). The first level reach is the
total number of users that see a message, as measured by the number of followers of the account that
posted. The second level reach is the amplified audience, combining the original number of followers

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with the number of followers of each user that shared the message. For example, @Reuters currently
has more than 1.4 million Twitter followers. If the handle posted a story mentioning you and then 100
people each with 1,000 followers retweeted the message, your total possible reach (combining first and
second level) would be more than 1.5 million users. It’s important that you add the caveat that these are
only estimated audience figures because the message only has the likelihood of being in their Twitter
feed. If you do not have a monitoring tool to calculate this number, TweetReach is a good free resource.
I also suggest reviewing your follow (or unfollow) growth rate on a regular basis; establish a monthly
average and pay attention to whether certain kinds of content result in a significant growth or decline in
followers. Some tools will also tell you the most active dates and times of day for your following base so
you can better understand when to post your messages. Again, if you don’t have a tool to use, free
services like TwitterCounter and Buffer can help.
Facebook
Like Twitter, the most basic metric in Facebook is posts, i.e. status updates. Facebook’s analytics
program, “Insights”, allows you to sort the performance of your posts according to their type: post,
photo, link, video, question, etc.
Keep in mind that the main way users will interact with your content is by clicking the Like button,
posting a comment, or commenting on your wall if they are allowed. If you allow others to add posts to
your wall, compare the number of comments that user-generated posts achieve verses your own posts
to better understand the tone and interest of your Facebook community. Users can also share your post
within Facebook or reference your page in their own status update. All of these factors affect your
“Talking about this” scores, which indicate how viral your message has become.
Facebook also provides each page or user with an audience metric. For individual users, this metric is
called friends. For pages, this used to be known as fans but is now referred to as “Likes.” This represents
the total possible number of people who could see a post in first level reach. In your Insights data, you
will also see a Friends of Fans metric that helps determine how much wider your full amplification could
be (similar to total reach in Twitter).
The main Insights graph allows you to plot all these posts verses people talking about this weekly reach.
With the ability to sort this graph by post type, you should be able to quickly discern what types of
content stimulate people to talk about you or to share your content.
Facebook provides a number of more detailed metrics, including elaborate demographics. I would
suggest reviewing this content if your strategic goals are to motivate a specific audience segment to
which you can correlate your Facebook community demographics. While Facebook does provide
additional analytics, you may not find what you are looking for. Third party applications that allow you
to organize your Twitter and Facebook posts together by campaign can help you to better compare how

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a single message performed across both networks. They can also provide better comparison of
performance and virality between user-generated posts and your own.
YouTube
YouTube is entirely different. The king metric here is views, the number of times someone has watched
your video. While YouTube does offer the ability for subscriptions to channels that post content, you
don’t have to be logged into YouTube to view videos. Subscribers are a better indicator of the people
most interested to see your content on a regular basis, rather than an ongoing metric of channel
success. A better metric to benchmark the size and influence of a YouTube channel is the total number
of video views.
YouTube analytics allow you to track engagement metrics across the channel or for individual messages.
These include likes, dislikes, comments, shares, favorites added, and favorites removed. In my opinion,
the sharing report may be the most useful metric, as it shows how often a video is shared using the
social sharing buttons embedded under your video. The report also allows you to segment shares by
social network so you can better align your YouTube performance with the rest of your social media
strategy.
YouTube also allows comments. While in many situations they may be useful, if you work for a large
enterprise or are covering a sensitive topic, you are likely to see a lot of comments that are negative or
spam-more than with any other social network. I say this not to dissuade you from allowing comments,
but rather to encourage you to use caution in interpreting comment metrics from YouTube in the same
way you might for Facebook.
YouTube also allows you to segment your channel or specific video by demographic information.
However, the more important reports are playback locations and traffic sources. Playback locations help
you understand if users are hitting your content directly off the video watch page or from your channel.
Traffic source reports allow you to understand the impact that Google search has on driving content to
your traffic as opposed to internal YouTube functions like search or related videos.
If your goals included video content or YouTube specifically, I would suggest that the most important
metrics to track are views and playback and traffic source reports. Reviewing these, along with your
social sharing reports, will allow you to plan more strategically designed YouTube content and identify
ways to drive traffic to these video assets.