In my last post, I addressed the importance of setting goals when considering a social media campaign, and shared tips on how to monitor conversations, build your following and find potential customers via Twitter.
Moving away from implementation, today’s post focuses on Jason Falls’ (@JasonFalls) presentation “Five Ways to Measure Social Media Success,” zeroing in on how to measure social media efforts and identify the ROI.
So, you’ve finally gotten the C-Suite on board for your social media campaign, but now you have to prove it’s effective (and worth the organization’s time and money).
After establishing goals and selecting the tools, set measurable objectives and strategies as part of your campaign – how will you use the tools to achieve your goals? Potential strategies include:
— Develop an incentive to get people to follow you via Twitter, or to like your page on Facebook.
— Advertise your incentive.
— Reach out to people you know regarding your incentive, and invite them to link to your pages, effectively broadcasting your content across other networks.
— Create content that encourages a new follower/fan to come back.
With strategies in place, set realistic benchmarks against which to measure your campaign outcomes. Doing this in the beginning means you’ll have something to compare your results with later.
How you measure your social media efforts (or what you’re able to measure) is based on the purpose social media marketing serves for your organization – is it aiding in brand awareness, building community, providing customer service, allowing for research & development, offering direct sales opportunities? Defining the purpose will help define your measurement strategies.
If you’re using social media for any of these reasons, learn to measure your effectiveness against the following goals:
— Increased awareness/reach (using focus groups and surveys)
— Positive enagagement/conversations (via social media monitoring through tools used or other services like Filtrbox)
— Growth of online community (track number of followers, fans, subscribers)
— Generation of new product ideas; improved product features/service lines
— Improved conversion rates (leads vs. clients)
After you’ve determined how best to measure your goals, continue to track them to evaluate your social media efforts.
If you’ve already implemented social media in your overall marketing strategy, have you identified your goals and benchmarks? If so, have you succeeded in reaching them?