As I’m sure many of you have seen, the “Social Media Revolution” video has recently been revamped to reflect social media’s latest – and fundamental impact on communicating today.

This video is chock full of stats, including:

- In less than 4 minutes and 30 seconds 100+ hours of video will be uploaded to YouTube

- If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s third largest

- Of Wikipedia’s 15 million articles, 78% are written in languages other than English

One of the video’s highlights shares that 60 millions status updates happen on Facebook daily. That metric is impressive, but what does that mean on an individual level? We often hear large-scale numbers and stats that take a global perspective, but to me, average engagement benchmarks are more interesting and useful in the execution of a social media campaign.

An example of helpful benchmark metrics are found in Harvard Family Research Project’s The Evaluation Exchange, a study regarding nonprofit organizations’ social media engagement, called “New Releases on Benchmarking Electronic Communications” (found on page 20).

Though generally, the study’s results aren’t revolutionary, they’re definitely interesting. A few of the baseline social media metrics could even prove helpful for future adjustments to our social media execution. I ran some numbers for two of our current campaigns, NGVsNow and AIDSVu, to see how they stand in comparison to the study’s findings.

- The study found that most organizations posted to their Facebook pages an average of 6 times per week and “tweeted” 4 or 5 times per day. In terms of NGVsNow we exceed these baseline metrics on both platforms. For AIDSVu we go above their Facebook statistic but are a bit low on the Twitter posts, as we put out roughly 3 per day.

- The findings demonstrated that on average, 2.5% of an organization’s Facebook fans responded to posts each week. Although NGVsNow has a lot of interaction on Facebook, since we have so many followers we don’t reach this percentage. AIDSVu is also below this mark, but we have been and will continue to make adjustments to ramp up this percentage. It’s too bad the study doesn’t include Twitter interaction metrics because I’m sure for both NGVsNow and AIDSVu we’d be above average as that is our strong suit.

The study presents general metrics used to measure Facebook and Twitter presence that are no surprise to us as we already track nearly all the metrics they cover. The only item that we haven’t tracked is what they refer to as “fan churn,” or the number of fans who come and go. We have been lucky enough to successfully retain fans without much loss so this metric isn’t as useful for us.

Social media campaigns live and die by the successes they generate. The key is knowing how to monitor these efforts in a consistent and comprehensive manner that can illustrate both success and room for improvement. This Harvard study can help any online campaign accomplish just that. Do you manage a social media campaign? How does your organization compare to these benchmarks?