Published Date: June 8, 2007

I just watched a video with Podtech’s Jeremiah Owyang and Eric Peterson, who is a web analytics expert and founder of Web Analytics Demystified. Eric believes there are two primary social media measurements:

  • Total number of people viewing/reading your content
  • Engagement

So, how do you measure user engagement, which many believe is the most important indicator of success? Time spent on your site has been a popular measure of stickiness lately. However, according to Eric, it’s certainly not the right measure of engagement since many internet users are using multiple tabs at one time and leave a page sitting for hours without touching it. I’d suggest watching the video, as it provides some interesting thoughts on social media measurement that I hadn’t really thought about much. Here’s the video:

The takeaway for me is that to effectively measure engagement, multiple sources of data need to be taken into account and scored. You can’t just base engagement with what is in the server logs.

If you’re super interested in the topic of web analytics, check out this White Paper (PDF) that Eric and Zori Bayriamova, former JupiterResearch analyst, put together.

Related posts:

  1. Social Media Videos
  2. Social Media Marketing Insights from Marshall Kirkpatrick
  3. The Social Media Conversation
  4. Social Media Meets Politics
  5. Social Media’s Impact on Business and PR