Whenever social media is mentioned to clients or C-level executives, the first response is how to track ROI. This “Holy Grail” of both marketing and accountability is as elusive as the golden cup in The Last Crusade of Indiana Jones. There are no bullet proof answers here. Social media works differently than traditional marketing, but that does not mean that the benefits of social media marketing cannot be quantified.
In order to better see what your social media marketing is doing, consider the following strategies to monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of your social campaigns.
When using Twitter be sure not to fall into the trap of counting just the number of followers. Having large numbers can give you exposure and drive massive traffic to your site. These large numbers of followers can work to your advantage, but a better determining factor is the number of re-tweets compared to your total number of followers. This will show how engaged your followers are and how well your content generation is doing. A great tool for tracking this is Tweetreach.
Facebook is pretty straightforward, keeping track of friends, fans to fan pages, numbers of people who commented on your posts, and number of friends that became fans. This can be tracked over a monthly period using Facebook insights.
Youtube is one of the fastest growing social media platforms next to Facebook. Tracking ROI here can be linked to the number of views of a video tied to a promotion or time period and the numbers of total subscriber’s toyour youtube channel.
Blog posts can be evaluated by noting the number of retweets a particular post receives and/or how many comments that post receives. Additionally, subscriptions to your RSS feeds and other blogs that mention your posts as well. The idea here is the same as the concept that was mentioned above regarding Twitter. Blog posts are all about interaction and getting other’s to broadcast your message or information. This requires you to have good content and have relationship with other people within your niche market.
Additional helpful tools include Radian 6, Biz360, and TweetEffect. These tools help you to measure your engagement with your target audience. Here is a great post by Chris Lake regarding engagement at 35 social media KPIs to help measure engagement.
Some additional tools that can assist with measuring influence include Twitalyzer, Social Mention, or ScoutLabs. Most of the tools mentioned here are provided at a cost, but they do offer demo versions to give you a chance to see what they do and how they work.
Determining reach, influence, and engagement are only part of the equation. Determining specifically what lead generation and conversion rates are being successful within these strategies requires documentation. Consider developing a custom spreadsheet in Excel with tabs for each social media platform or campaign you use. Document the metrics you feel are important, necessary, and track them monthly.
For even more information on tracking, checkout Mani Karthik’s post 9 Tools to measure your Twitter Influence & Reach !
To get a bigger picture of the continuing discussion on this topic, SocialMedia Examiner has excellent coverage and information at Is Social Media Marketing Measurable? The Big Debate.
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