As you probably know, social media tools and platforms are having a huge impact on many aspects of business, from customer service and employee hiring to marketing and product development.
But how do you actually know if your social engagement efforts are successful?
Some have argued that it’s silly to ask for ROI or to measure things; after all you wouldn’t ask what the ROI of answering the phone is, would you? Or maybe you would.
My philosophy is that you have to be where your fans and enthusiasts are (if it fits with your goals and objectives). If people are talking about you and you’re not listening, responding and engaging with them, that’s bad business. But if you’re running specific programs, promotions and initiatives that require time, money and resources, you need to be measuring what’s working and what’s not working. Before you do that you need to set goals and look at how social media can support them by mapping metrics to these goals.
Ultimately, I believe in looking at a bigger picture (social, search and email factors and trends) to understand your online recognition and reputation and their impact on your business. It is kind of silly to look at things in silos, as social, search and email all are connected and can affect each other. But this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t also look at what your specific social media initiatives are doing for you. While your company should create a customized measurement program that is based on real goals, here are six overall buckets to examine.
Business Metrics
There are tools out there that can help you link specific social media efforts to business outcomes. These are things such as leads, new email subscribers, sales and donations. I use a tool called Argyle Social for this. You can create campaigns and see which links/posts to social sites are driving the most conversions.
Depending on your goals, you may also want to be tracking other things (assign a value to them first), such as number of calls to customer service over time, number of new ideas submitted or the number of times people have given feedback on your products or services. Keep track of these things and look at how your social engagement has affected them.
Share of Voice and Sentiment
In social media, share of voice refers to the number of conversations about your brand vs. your competitors/market. To do this, you’ll want to use a monitoring program that can help you keep track of all conversations about your brand and your competitors over a given time period. When looking at all these mentions you’ll want to make sure to track which ones are positive, negative and neutral, so you can assign a weight to each of these categories and calculate your average sentiment. To get share of voice, you divide the number of conversations about your brand by the total number of conversations about brands in your market. Jay Baer has a great beginner’s guide to share of voice on his blog, and some useful spreadsheets to help you get started.
It’s good to keep track of share of voice and sentiment over time, so you can see how your social engagement and promotions are affecting your overall trends and use this information to make smarter marketing decisions. Also, if your sentiment/share of voice jumps or drops suddenly, then you’ll want to dig deeper to understand why.
Awareness
Building awareness may be one of your goals or jobs as a marketer. A few things that may help signal online awareness include:
- Amount of website traffic/site visits/page views
- Number of searches for brand terms
- Video and content views
Engagement
Engagement is the extent to which people interact with you and your content. Some signs of engagement include:
- Likes (of a Facebook page and of your content)
- Shares
- Mentions (positive, negative, neutral)
- Blog comments
- Ratings
- Retweets
- Email opens and clicks, complaints, etc. Don’t forget about email, as your participation on social sites can have a positive (or negative, if you’re doing it wrong) impact on your numbers here.
Influence
Influence is the likelihood that what you’re doing inspires action. Some signals of influence may include:
- Number of (and quality of) inbound links to your content
- Likelihood that emails drive actions
- Likelihood that Twitter links are retweeted or commented on
- Likelihood that Facebook posts will be commented on and liked
- Likelihood that content will be shared/liked (and to what extent)
Popularity
Online popularity is essentially just the number of people subscribed to your content. Some people always say it’s all about the quality of your following, not the quantity. That’s true to some extent; however if you’re looking for advertisers or sponsors to partner with on social programs, having 10,000 followers on Twitter looks a lot better than having 500. Some examples of online popularity signals include:
- Number of email subscribers
- Number of followers on Twitter
- Number of members of a LinkedIn group
- Number of people who like your Facebook page
I hope these buckets serve as helpful starting points for you. Before starting a new program, make sure you understand your current numbers for this so you can see how things change over time.
What do YOU think about these buckets as starting points for social media measurement?
If you’d ever like help measuring your social engagement efforts, please feel free to email me (jason at ewaydirect dot com) or drop me a line on Twitter. At eWayDirect (where I work), we've developed something we call eMindshare, which helps you benchmark your online awareness and sentiment vs. your competitors and keep track of how you're doing. If you'd like to know more, let me know.