Measuring Your Brand's Social Media Efforts
In today's world there is no denying the influence of social media, both on individuals and businesses. This influence has changed the 'tool-kit' for online marketers as well as opened new opportunities (like the new buzz word, social media expert—that's another story for another post though). With this new tool-kit come many new questions, with one of the top asked being, 'how do you measure your social media activity/marketing?'
Many seem to think that social media cannot be measured accurately at the moment, when in actual fact it can, it just depends on many elements. You see, quite often I hear of people measuring the amount of new fans that their Page has, or the amount of followers their Twitter account has (or connections on LinkedIn and on and on), and while this can be an important element of a brand's measuring metrics, on its own it will always fall short of any truly measurable numbers. A large part of the reliability on measuring these metrics is in part due to the fact that it is both difficult and time consuming to actually dig in and measure the metrics that ultimately mean something to a brand's bottom line.
Don't get me wrong, while measuring the amount of fans that your Facebook Page received in recent times, and the amount of people that are now following you on Twitter can be considered 'fluff' on their own, they can be important statistics to take into account when analyzing your brand's social media efforts. Measuring the numbers of fans while identifying and analyzing their actions is the process that is more important, and beneficial, to take on board. Are they heading back to your website, making purchases of your products, or spreading positivity about your brand to a channel online? In essence, the focus should be to measure the behaviour of fans and followers, rather than, solely, the aggregation.
In most all cases of measuring social media, comes a daisy chain. This is the reason that many don't go any further than measuring the number of fans, followers or connections in the first place. This daisy chain requires a lot of back and forth between the metrics from your Facebook Page, or your links/followers on Twitter and your website's own analytics (not to mention the further reach of surveying people about the brand or product), and following the actions, attention and content pushed from these sources throughout your online presence—not just the one source (website, or Facebook Page for example). All of these elements need to be attached to your website analytics in order to truly measure what is working and what is not, which will enable you to create an understanding to further improve, not only a brand's website status, but their social media presence and awareness both online and off. This can be as simple as tracking how many people arrived from a social source to your product page, but often goes much deeper, with the metrics being studied dependant on the product, target audience, whether it was a campaign and the desired outcome—it quite often entails more than simply tracking actions on a product page via social media.
Aside from the bottom line, monitoring the actions of fans and followers gives great insight into the target audience, which ultimately, should lead to an increase in sales as you will develop an even greater understanding of your market, you can address the changes to the demographic and be on top of it all when a shift in the demographic becomes apparent. This also can aid in building 'brand advocates', something that every brand should strive to achieve. Why? Because word of mouth is huge, because they will ultimately help make you money and because they don't ask for money in return, just the continued great product or service that they have come to love, and that you should enjoy providing them. It also enables us to see whether the content being pushed to a social network is in fact on target with your audience. If people are continuing to 'Like' and share your content, then there is a fair indication that the content being shown to them is relevant and appropriate to your audience.
Your social media efforts should be— no, are—a part of your online marketing strategy. They are not a separate entity and should be treated as such. Embracing this will see your SEO efforts improve as content is still king, and content creation goes hand in hand with social media, not to mention Google and Bing admitting to using social media in the search rankings. Social media is absolutely measurable, it just involves getting your hands dirty through lots of analysis, which is what I love about it.
This is a fairly hot topic online and in the marketing realm at the moment and I am sure many have views or opinions. If you are one of them why not add it to the comments below, I would love to hear your thoughts!
