As with any campaign, the metrics that you choose to measure should align with your campaign objectives.  Forrester suggests that marketers fail because they tend to focus on the metrics that are most easily available, as opposed to those that best correspond to their objectives.

So start with clear goals.  As we covered in a previous column, be clear why you’re planning a social media program.  Is it for customer service, marketing or PR, product support or development, sales, grassroots marketing?  Market research? Will it help your SEO efforts by building inbound links? Once you decide on why you’re involved with social media you want to concentrate on the metrics that matter most.  You don’t want to waste time looking at measurements that show how well your influencer program is going when what you wanted to do was improve customer service.

Some examples of metrics that tie back to the specific goals of a social media program include: engagement, traffic, viral analysis, influencer tracking, and sentiment.  If you want to generate sales, you might be looking at driving engagement – getting people to spend time understanding your offering. In this case you’d want to track your conversion and not focus on things like number of links or retweets.   Businesses where grass roots or word of mouth marketing are drivers should understand what is going viral for their brand and why.

Social media brings a couple of new metrics to online marketing – influence and sentiment.  It’s crucial for marketers to know who their social media influencers are.  This is a challenge for marketers since the opinions of a relatively unknown individual thought leader can be more powerful than a celebrity in terms of how their comments or actions affect a brand.

Sentiment brings with it even more nuance. We can now “listen in” on a vast number of conversations, and the numbers of conversations and people involved are only one aspect of it.  In order to discern what people are really saying and thinking, we need to be able to understand the “tone” of the conversations.

Common social media metrics include number of comments and shares, along with the number of readers/followers/fans/likes, etc.  These are the numbers that start to determine influence.  But it’s not so simple.  If one tweeter is only followed by a few people, but those followers retweet everything that tweeter says, and their tweets are then seen by thousands of other tweeters, then that aggregation of posts, comments, followers, and retweeters can help marketers determine who the influencers are.

You want to be able to track the impact of your social marketing efforts and refine your activities based on the social data.  Social media measurement is vital for benchmarking and tracking your success over time.  It helps you compare your activity with that of your competitors, analyse the vast numbers of tweets and blog posts and comments, start to understand what all that data means, and then turn your insights into actions.

Go Back

Comments

Post has no comments.

Post a Comment

Name (optional)

Website (optional)

Email Address (optional)

Please fill in the text in the image in the box below

Your comment