How to Quantify Social Media Efforts?
Are you looking for better ways to measure your social media activities? Do you know if your social media efforts are worthwhile? Social media measurement is one of the most frustrating challenges businesses face in today’s world. But, measuring the effectiveness of your social media marketing campaign is important.
Why Measure?
In order to measure the effectiveness of your social campaigns, it’s critical that you know your objective. Ask yourself why you are considering including social media in your overall marketing campaign in the first place. How will your efforts impact your revenue and grow your business? You’ll want to put a measurable outcome in place along with a timeframe in which to achieve the goal. Any business marketing efforts should always setup goals for measuring social media effectiveness. This will allow you to determine which social media platform aligns with your objectives.
Quantify Social Media Listening
“What you’re doing [on social media] needs to have impact. It needs to actually have revenue. And often times we try to make it fuzzy about that.”
– Frank Eliason, Citi’s Director, Global Social Media
Listening is one of the most often overlooked uses of social media, yet it’s probably the most important. If you’re not listening to your customers, you’re missing the point of social media. But how do you measure listening and how does it impact your revenue? Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest, and many other Social Media applications offer methods of measuring the number of times a company or business name is mentioned in discussions in their spectrum of social members. This is an excellent method of quantifying the effectiveness of social media.
You can learn things like:
- Exactly how many people you’re helping
- If you’re growing that number of people
- The issues customers are experiencing with your business
- What’s broken in your business
At the end of the measurement period, prioritize the problems you identify and use that intelligence to implement fixes and improvements within your business. You can measure the direct impact on your business by looking at the additional revenue or cost savings that these new fixes give you.
Create Rating Systems for Social Engagement
“Put a [tiered point system] in place rather than looking at how many likes you have.”
– Scott Monty, Ford’s global head of social media
This is a simple yet effective strategy to use when trying to generate awareness and buzz. It’s a smart way to measure the response to your efforts on Facebook, Twitter or any other social channel you’re using.
Here’s how it works. Say you’re launching a product or service and want to build buzz about it on Facebook. You post an update to your Page about your launch and you get a bunch of likes on it. The next day, you post a different type of update. You get some likes on it, but you also see that people are engaging more with the second update by sharing the post and commenting on it.
Likes show support and comments indicate a deeper interest but shares are most valuable because they move the update beyond your page.
At the beginning of the campaign, translate your objective to a numeric goal. Then, use a tiered point system to weight different types of engagement according to which is most valuable to you.
Here’s an example of a tiered point system for Facebook:
- Likes: 1 point each
- Comments: 5 points each
- Shares: 10 points each
During the campaign, a quick sum of values will help you determine if your efforts on Facebook are moving you closer towards your goal or not. You can create similar point systems on any of the social channels you use. For example, on Twitter, 5 points for a reply and 10 points for a retweet.
Add Value, Then Sell and Measure
“Jab, jab, jab, right hook.”
– Gary Vaynerchuk
This strategy is the concept behind Gary V.’s upcoming book and it’s based on providing great content that adds tons of value for your customers before asking for the sale.
For example, say your restaurant is rolling out a new healthy menu. Your goal is to get 300 customers into your restaurant to try the new menu over an upcoming weekend.
Since your food is visually appealing, you develop a Facebook or Instagram strategy. You post pictures of your food, create content around the importance of healthy eating and curate information on your Facebook Page about farmers’ markets in your area.
Offer this valuable content to build trust with people. Then offer a coupon for your restaurant on your Facebook Page. The number of people who claim and redeem your coupon is a result you can quantify.
Here’s how to measure your efforts when using this strategy:
- Use the tiered point system described in strategy #2 to determine if your content is moving you closer to your goal.
- Use coupons that are specific to your social media campaign, thus making the return on your investment easy to track and measure.
- Create unique landing pages for each of your campaigns where your customers can download or purchase what you are promoting. Since the landing page is used for one specific campaign, this will allow you to clearly see how successful your campaign is.
What do you think? Can you improve the effectiveness of your social media campaigns with some of the above strategies? What simple strategies are you using to measure your campaigns?
If you are looking to get noticed on the Internet but don’t know where to begin, let PTC Computer Solutions help you get started or help improve your current website and website marketing plan. We can plan a full budget for your company and complete any web marketing efforts you wish to achieve to deliver a consistent and effective message to your prospects. Contact David W. B. Parker (the “W. B.” stands for WeB) at davidp@ptccomputersolutions.com or go to www.ptccomputersolutions.com for more information.
By David W. B. Parker
President
PTC Computer Solutions
6/19/2013
Special thanks to socialmediaexaminer.com for assistance with this article.