In social media, conversion is is a process. It is more than the act of becoming a member; it is the process of active participation. Conversion should measure how visitors respond to the interactive features of social media. This is the “responsiveness” part of engagement R&R (retention and responsiveness) about which I’ve previously written.

Here are some social networking conversion events that are worth tracking:

• Membership (creating an account)
• Logging in
• Posting a message or comment
• Tagging
• Create a poll
• Vote in a poll
• Rank an item
• Uploading
• Reporting misbehavior
• Updating a calendar
• Creating or updating a profile, album or other collection
• Updating status
• Adding friends
• Inviting friends
• Emailing items to friends

The first time a visitor does any of these is a conversion event; the more of them they do and the more often they do them, the more responsive they are. In other words, a conversion score would count how many “firsts” take place over time; responsiveness is the total of such events.

As always, it is tempting to consider some of these actions more significant than others. I remain unconvinced that such complexity adds insight, but it is always worth doing the analysis to see how the they correlate to one another, or ideally, how well they correlate to a primary research source, such as visitor surveys.

Finally, it is worth remembering, always, that you aren’t necessarily measuring conversion; you may really be measuring the quality of your user interface. If people aren’t using social network features, the cause may be poor design. Testing, such as A/B testing, is essential to remove that ambiguity.