Research question:

Think about 3 different levels of engagement in social media: lurkers, active, and loyalists. Which social media metrics would best describe these levels? E.g. are page views a good indication of loyalists and in that case why?

1. The principle of social media metrics

Social media metrics is to measure the content, link and other element/phenomenon in social media with the methods, tools, and indicators for special goals. Analysis of the quality and quantity of the ordinary case can be divided into three aspects: awareness, influence, engagement. There are many kinds of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), for example, subscribers, followers, readers, page views, time on site, visitors, fans, retweets, links, comments, bookmarks, ratings, reviews.

2. The engagement metrics in social media

The metrics of user interest in engagement gives the success of social media platforms and the corresponding implications for advertising, market, and user satisfaction. Engagement defines the phenomena of being captivated and motivated. Engagement can be measured in terms of a single interactive session or of a more long-term relationship with the social platform across multiple interactions. The terms of social media engagement extend from how a single interaction unfolds, to why people develop a relationship with a platform or service and integrate it into their lives. As an interaction or a conversation, engagement is an indicator of how well speakers are interacting with their audiences.

Measuring audiences’ engagement in this manner is a key indicator of how well they are listening and the interaction with speakers and other audiences in order to analysis relationship, affinity and loyalty. In general, the status of engagement could be grouped into readers, followers, subscribers, fans, buyers, visitors, and so on. According to the participation, the levels could be defined as recommended, purchased, interacted, clicked, commented, repeated, rated, saved, and saw.

3. The indicators for three levels of engagement

When defined lurkers, active, and loyalists as the three levels of engagement, the interactions relate to comment, fill profiles, active members, mention, like/favorite, reviews, recommendation, etc. The best social media metrics which describe these three levels would be page views, ratings, time on site, and subscribers.

The “page view” and the “time on site” are the basic assessment for user classify, for lurkers, at least, they should know the site address and find some information; for active groups and loyalists, how many time they used to spend and how many pages they used in website decides the rate of enthrallment. The website/pages is/are the real virtual community for the most loyalists.

The “subscribers” is the most important indicator to evaluate the commercial value. The “ratings” normally is the best indicator to distinguish the long range users.