subject: How Do You Measure Social Media Success? [print this page] How Do You Measure Social Media Success? How Do You Measure Social Media Success?
One of the most problematic elements of social media networking is that of measurability. Company heads figure, "How can I justify the expense of a social media campaign if I can't track my results?" This is a legitimate objection, though the idea that social media marketing is immeasurable is mistaken.
The fact is that there are measuring tools available to you. There are websites and software that can track click through rates, subscribers, signals, keywords, behavior statistics, volume, location, and even "positivity and negativity in tone." Therefore, the idea that there is no way of tracking social media success is a misconception at this point in 2011.
What about the fact that it deals with many intangibles? It is true that unlike SEO and PPC, a great deal of this content is not measurable by clicking and by pure profit. Some of what you will be doing here is building brand awareness, repairing your image after a customer complaint, showing yourself to be an expert in the industryand all sorts of achievements that do not come with an easy tracking system.
Not to worry, there are various methods to track what is "untraceable." Let's move beyond traffic stats and your number of "friends", which are fairly easy ways to track your success. Consider this: you can keep track of your interaction with prospects by noting the number of times someone leaves comments, or participates in forums or leaves ratings/reviews and so on. This is a nice way of determining your brand favourability and brand awareness.
You can trace your referrals (through tracking software) from SM sites to your commercial site. You can also find out how your customers feel about your new policies or specials by surveying them outright or by merely noting their natural observations to your posts. You can study customer retention and keep track of your total number of subscribers for a blog and for email updates.
You can keep track of the number of times your links were clicked and how many times they were reposted somewhere else using monitoring software. Remember also to thoroughly review all comments and reaction comments to make sure you are producing positivity amongst the community. Not only is there software that can track this for you, but you can make that determination using your own observations.
Once you notice a problem with negativity, or a shortage of comments (and so on) then it's time to tweak the campaign. Remember the key to professional social networking in the first place: to clearly define your goals and then to achieve them using this new online tool. Measuring social media is a cinch once you understand your own objectives.
