Metrics You Should Be Tracking: Sharing Metrics

Business leaders who employ content marketing strategies use a variety of metrics to measure the success of each content campaign. One of the most important metrics used by executives is sharing metrics, which is the measure of how many times a given piece of content was shared by others within their social or professional networks. Tracking this metric is a good way to understand the type of content that consumers will share. As such, this measure can help firm leaders shape their content marketing strategies to allow for optimal success.

Measuring sharing metrics is a matter of looking at shares on social networking sites and setting up analytic tools to track how many times a given piece of content has been shared, liked, given a +1, retweeted, pinned or otherwise reposted. Using measurement tools for key content platforms is the first step in gathering useful sharing metrics.

Of course, it’s also important to track types of sharing that don’t occur on social networking sites. Imagine that a group of commercial litigation attorneys in Pittsburgh send out a weekly newsletter about changes in commercial law. The attorneys will need to track how many times their emails are forwarded in order to understand whether or not the newsletter is valuable in terms of sharing metrics. This is a particularly important measure for firms that want to craft a strong reputation within the legal community. One lawyers forwarding another legal professional an email or newsletter can be a sign that the content is seen as valuable and reliable.

Remember that content should drive action. It’s important to analyze sharing metrics in light of lead generation metrics. Many firm leaders get caught up in how many followers they have on social networking sites. While the overall number of followers can be important, remember to focus on how those followers are using content and whether or not content is driving followers to become clients.