How To Develop Your Own Social Media Engagement Index

Sherpa Level 3

We’ve described elsewhere in detail the process of creating your own Optimal Content Score for media coverage. It’s a way to rate your results based on what “good results” or “bad results” means specifically for your program or brand. Here is a similar approach applied to measuring engagement with social media.

To develop a customized index for social media engagement with your brand or program (i.e. any owned media), start by referring to your goals.

What are the priorities and objectives of your specific program? What sort of engagement do you want to encourage? If you are a new organization and trying to build a following, a like might be an acceptable level of engagement. If you are an established brand with a message to get across, then a like or even a short comment may not be sufficient.

The most important thing is to start with a discussion of your goals and objectives, the perceived path to purchase, and the role that senior leadership believes that your social media engagement program plays in that path to purchase. That will determine the weightings and the specific elements of your index. It might look something like the suggested scoring below, and would be applied to all your content.

Social Media Engagement Index

Each item of your content receives a score, then both the total score and the average score per month or week is calculated. Ideally you would collect three to six months of data and correlate it with sales leads, conversions, or some other business metric to most accurately determine which actions correlate most closely with the business outcomes.

There are any number of tools, like Simply Measured or Sprout Social, that will provide most of this information. You will need a web analytics tool like Google Analytics or Simply Measured to find the number of clicks to specific URLs and to determine correlation rates with web traffic. ∞