Do You Have a Plan for Measuring Your Social Media Marketing?
December 15th, 2009 by Li Evans
What is success? What is failure?
When it comes to social media marketing, unless you have a plan to measure what your are doing how will you know? There’s a lot to be said about planning your social media strategy, knowing where your audience is, understanding how they talk about you, getting something to go “viral”, accepting the negative with the positive, throwing up social media tactics like darts to a bulls-eye. It’s subjects we’ve talked about here on Social Conversations, but unless you have a plan to measure what you are doing, you’ll never know if what you are doing is worth the investment you are putting into it.
While there’s a lot of numbers counting, and those numbers can be very subjective, you still need to have a social media measurement plan. For example, counting the number of Twitter followers you have, isn’t really a great measure if you want to measure the quality of your reach. However if you are just starting up a Twitter account, monitoring and counting how many followers you are attaining on a daily or weekly basis can be decent way of gauging how you are progressing in the beginning. Once you reach a certain threshold, counting the number of followers can be and overwhelming task to keep up with and weed out the spammers. It’s the same for counting the number of fans you have, or friends on other social networking sites. It can be a good “check” but it can’t be the be all end all to your measurement plan.
A social media marketing measurement plan needs to include a lot of checks and balances. For example, how do you know if the content you are creating is really valuable to your audience? Do you count the number of retweets you get? Or is it the number of retweets from those “quality” followers that you’ve predefined on a list. Maybe it’s the number of times your content has been embedded? Perhaps the amount of traffic that is being driven to your page, or maybe even adding in how much time on site do the visitors coming into the content are averaging.
Then there’s the whole integration with “offline”, if you have those types of measurement. Even if you are an online business, you likely still need to track something offline. How are people hearing about you? Did someone tell them to come to your Facebook page while they talked on a flight to San Diego? Maybe they sat next to someone at a Coyotes hockey game and it was suggested they check out your video. How do you account for and measure those aspects of your social media marketing efforts?
When it comes down to it, if you can’t measure it, you need to ask yourself if you should be really implementing that particular social media tactic?
Putting together a social media measurement plan should be an integral part of your social media strategy. It makes sure your entire team is on the same page when it comes to what and how things are going to be measured. It also gives your team the ammunition they need to prove or disprove that something is working to help or harm your brand or company. How you are measuring is just as important as what you are measuring as well. This is why it’s important that everyone from the C-Suite executives to your data analytics teams understand what the end goals are and what & how you are measuring to see if your efforts are helping you meet those goals.
At the end of the day do you want to really be answering the question from your CMO “Well why are we still doing this?” with “Well because Oprah’s on Twitter now!” ?
Child With Measuring Book Photo Credit: Flickr User Goldberg
Archeology Team Measuring Photo Credit: Flickr User Wessex Archeology
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As someone who does social media research, I really doubt that most of these ’social media experts’ have the ability to accurately measure their campaigns well- in fact I know they don’t. At best they rely on doing a lot of stuff manually and relying on poorly written consumer Twitter toys/tools to give them ‘meaningful’ information. It doesn’t work like that.
Maybe all someone really cares about is their sales- and that’s fine and easy to track the referring links, but what did you really learn about your customers, what worked, what didn’t, who was influential, who was a detractor?
Were you only measuring on one network (Twitter) and doing some ‘realtime’ Google searches? Again, that doesn’t work so well. It doesn’t give you any real feedback. You’re working with small datasets that are scattered points. What you really need is a lot of data about what was said on you, but also everything you can get about who said it and their networks.
Let’s put it this way, it requires a LOT more programming, datamining and statistical analysis to do this right than most of these ‘marketing experts’ can muster.
Hey David -
Thanks for stopping by and contributing to the conversation!
I definitely agree with you. A lot of marketers who get into social media marketing don’t have a clue what to measure let alone how to measure much beyond “counting” the number of fans or followers they have. A lot of data mining and understanding how to pull, extrapolate and analysis of the data needs to be done. Especially if you want to turn that data into meaningful points that the C-Suite can understand how it all affects the bottom line.
Just counting, while it can be a good start in the beginning because you have nothing to base anything from, after a while can be misleading. The true way to measure the success and failures is by planning the goals behind those counts and how those counts affect things like sales, brand lift, sign ups, creation of evangelists, time saved at call centers, etc.
It’s a lot more than saying “hey we got 10 followers today!”
~Li