Here’s what we track on YouTube:

• Total subscribers. This number shows the total number of people who subscribe to our library’s YouTube channel. We want this number to go up.
• Subscriber net change. This number shows at a glance if we lost or gained subscribers.
• Number of monthly views. This is the total number of views. This number helps us figure out if our videos are being watched and if there was a particularly popular video. If I see this number fluctuate a lot, I can take a look at individual videos for the month and figure out what happened.
    For example, in February 2012, we almost doubled our usual views (9,935 versus 5,160 in January and 6,114 in March). Looking at our YouTube analytics, I can tell that there was a huge spike in viewership on February 7, 2012 (over 2,000 viewers in one day). Then I can figure out why. In this case, it looks like someone using Reddit discovered and shared our video titled “Interview with Photographer Jim Richardson.” We displayed some of his photos in our art gallery and created a video interview with him. Sharing that video on Reddit caused the huge spike. We want more of these spikes!
• Likes and dislikes. This is an engagement measurement that counts how many times people click the Like and Dislike buttons.
• Comments. This provides a count of how many comments each video received within YouTube. It’s another engagement measurement.
• Shares and favorites. This shows how many people favorited or shared a video.
• Number of videos posted. This shows how many videos we uploaded to YouTube. This helps me know how active we are on YouTube.

We have five Twitter accounts. As of June 26, 2012, we have to track these statistics manually. Twitter doesn’t have a built-in analytics section. We are in the process of moving official tweeting to HootSuite (see section on tools below), which includes some analytics—hopefully that will help us track numbers.

But for now, we track these things for each of our Twitter accounts:

• Following. The number of people we follow.
• Followers. The number of people following us. This should steadily rise if we are creating good Twitter content.
• Retweets. We track how many people retweeted one of our posts. This shows interest and engagement. To count this, I actually scroll through Twitter’s Connect page and count them manually—not ideal, but also not very time-consuming.
• Number of mentions. This shows how many times someone mentioned us in Twitter, demonstrating interest and engagement in the topics we post.
• Number of Tweets. I count how many Tweets we posted for the month, mainly to figure out how much time we spent using Twitter.

Unlike Twitter, Facebook provides an Insights section for Facebook pages. Here’s what we watch:

• Total likes. This shows the number of unique people who Liked our page.
• Weekly total reach. This tracks how many friends and “friends of friends” saw our status updates.
• People talking about this. This shows how many people in Facebook actually did something based on what we posted. So, if someone liked, favorited, or commented on a status update, that activity will be reflected in this number.
• Number of posts. This number is similar to what we watch with Twitter, to help gauge our monthly work in Facebook.

We have about twenty-four blogs on our website. We track three things specific to blogs:

• Total subscribers (through FeedBurner). This gives us a monthly view of subscribership. If the numbers are going up, that’s good. Growing numbers mean people are loving your content enough to subscribe and word of mouth about the content is spreading. If subscribership stays static or goes down, this probably means just the opposite.
• Total comments. This shows engagement with the content and with the writer. If a blog gets more comments than normal for a given month, that means we need to examine the content written during that month in more detail and see what people liked (or didn’t like). And then we need to figure out how to provide more content along the same vein or change direction.
• Total views. Total views of all posts on a blog written during that month. This number should go up.

We track the following things on Foursquare:

• Total check-ins. This number tracks the total number of people who decided to check in at the library using Foursquare. If this number goes up, it means customers are sharing where they are with their other Foursquare friends.
• Average check-ins per day. This is an interesting statistic. It provides an average number of daily check-ins and shows trends for a given month. If this number goes up, it means that more people are checking in daily. More check-ins means people are interested in your event or building enough to share with their Foursquare followers that they checked in to the library.
• All-time check-ins. A total number of check-ins. Good to watch this number grow.

We aren’t using Google Plus much yet, other than having set up our profile and posted a few status updates. People are friending us though—both other librarians and people living in our service area. So I expect that we will eventually do more with Google Plus. These are the numbers we look at:

• People who have added us. This tracks the number of friends we have, and it is steadily growing.
• Number of posts. This shows the number of posts we have made in a month.

Flickr is a great photo-sharing service, but it’s hard to extract useful statistics. Flickr provides statistics, but not really in a usable format. It provides daily and “all time” statistics, but not statistics for the month or even the last thirty days. Because of that, potentially interesting statistics for likes, favorites, views, or comments are difficult to get. So we don’t work with these statistics, but gather these two numbers instead:

• Total items. How many photos we added. This shows staff engagement with sharing photos.
• Total views. Total views is a sneaky way to get total monthly views out of Flickr. To see the monthly total, subtract last month’s total views from this month’s total views, and voila!—you have a total monthly views number.

We have set up a library group in Goodreads. We track one statistic for the group:

• Total members. This number shows people who have signed up for our group. It is steadily growing.

Pinterest is very new, but growing like crazy. Here’s what we are tracking for now:

• Followers. This shows the number of followers we have for our account as a whole.
• Following. This number shows how many people we are following.
• Pins. This shows the number of Pins. (A Pin in Pinterest is a way to bookmark something, like a photo, on the Web. Pinning makes that photo show up on your Pinterest page.)
• Followers on individual boards. This one is interesting. We have sixteen boards, mainly focused on our physical topic-driven neighborhoods in the physical library. We can get the number of followers for each board. So we watch these numbers to check for interest. If numbers on an individual board increase, we’ll continue to use it. If they go down, we either need to figure out why and adapt accordingly, or we need to drop that board and focus on something else.