Social Media Measurement
Measuring your social media efforts
While all of this information about social media may be helpful, you’re probably wondering what impact it can have on your business. The biggest direct evidence of your investment in social media is user engagement or activity. But, activity itself doesn’t fuel your business. Your business is fueled by profits (or surplus in the chamber world) and profits require customers to buy your product or support your organization’s revenue stream in some direct way. Long term, that’s the only way that social media activity will translate into a return on investment for the time and energy that you spend on it.
But what about adding value through branding and visibility? That is important and, by doing social media “right,” you can help to increase the visibility of your brand. But unless branding and visibility creates more leads, referrals or a greater propensity to consume your product or service, how does it help? If more frequent conversations and improved relationships are not monetized in some way, they aren’t bringing real value to your business.
Even though social media is cheap, it’s not free! In fact it can be quite expensive when you total up the amount of time that you can spend if you lose your focus and get “sucked in” to the myriad of sites and plethora of information available. That’s why you need to set realistic goals for both how much time you will invest and what you want to get out of your social media activity.
Everyone should have some sort of a presence on social media, and at a minimum, should be monitoring your brand. By doing these basic steps, you will make connections at a very minimal investment. But how will you know what additional steps to take, and how will you judge the results?
How do you measure those results in the real (non-virtual) world? What’s the value of a half hour spent talking to a stranger at a cocktail party? What’s the value of spending an afternoon with a client at the ballpark or on the golf course? What’s the value of sitting down for a few hours to catch up on the week’s newspapers and trade magazines? How do you monetize your direct mail pieces? How do you determine the results of your latest telephone outreach program?
For all of these examples, you probably have answers to the way you view the impact that these experiences have on your business. In some instances, you may feel like it was time well spent because you feel like it helped build the relationship in some way. Think about the last few experiences you had on the golf course, a client dinner or an extended conversation at a networking event. Can you quickly estimate the value? Unfortunately, a lot of people just don’t think this way about their interactions. If you are one of those people, valuing the time you spend on social media may be even harder because your measurement systems may need to be readjusted.
If you do understand the impact these experiences have on your business, then your social media ROI is going to be a little easier to get your head around. You will use the same kind of thought process that you do today, you will just use some different tools to build your relationships.
Measuring social media is different from some of the more traditional methods of marketing because not all of the results are tangible. Some of the results of social media are more indirect and will be seen over time.
So, let’s review. Measuring the results of your social media efforts is just as important as measuring the things you are doing in the rest of your business. However, it’s just a little bit harder because you have to take the extra step of linking the online activity you generate back to the hard results that fuel your business model. What is the “return on engagement” for your social media efforts? How do more “friends or links” and more “reads and references” get you more revenue and profit?
Once you’ve begun to use social media, it is important to understand your campaign’s performance in order to make informed decisions about what works, and what doesn’t work in your social media practices. Measuring the impact of a social media initiative requires little money, but it does take planning and attentiveness.
Here are some basic tips and resources you can use to measure the effectiveness of your social media efforts:
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Review your goals.
When you completed the social media strategy worksheet, what goals did you set out to accomplish through social media? Have you been able to obtain them? For example, one might have been to increase event registrations by 10%. Were you able to achieve that?
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Use a program to measure what’s being said about your brand.
There are a multitude of applications that will help you monitor your brand, and we have listed the most popular below:
HowSociable? Overview of the visibility of a brand across 22 dimensions. Put your brand in and see where it’s being mentioned and what’s being said.
Attentio Blog search engine that allows both tracking and comparing of different search terms.
PostRank Provides detailed information on tweets, stumbles, and diggs.
Social Mention Searches and tracks user-generated content such as blog posts, comments, bookmarks, events, news, videos, and microblogging services.
TruCast A service that tracks what people are saying about your brand online and if their comments are positive, negative, or neutral.
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Track user engagement.
Do your followers engage with you on your social media sites? Do they submit comments, retweet your content, or share links to your information? If so, this not only builds a relationship with your audience, but it helps spread word of mouth marketing when your members share your content with their network of people.
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Expand your network.
Is your fan page growing at a steady rate? Have you seen an increase in the number of members on your page, support for advocacy issues, event registrations and membership numbers?
Do your followers engage with you on your social media sites? Do they submit comments, retweet your content, or share links to your information? If so, this not only builds a relationship with your audience, but it helps spread word of mouth marketing when your members share your content with their network of people.
There is a lot of information out there that can help shape your thinking about how you’ll measure your social media effectiveness. We’ve provided additional links below because this is probably one of the most important areas for you to consider. Since social media will consume your time and your time is what makes your business go, you need to ensure that you can measure how your time is being spent and whether or not your efforts are paying off!
Additional Reading:
Measuring the value of conversations in social media engagement
Six Recommendations for Measuring the Success of Your Blog
Measuring Influence vs. Popularity
Influence and Popularity in Social Media
Social Media Metrics Superlist: Measurement, ROI & Key Statistics Resources
It’s Official, Fortune 100 CEOs are Social Media Slackers
Oliver Blanchard: Basics of Social Media ROI