Measuring Social Media. My Mantra is... ‘Measure What Matters’.

Social media activity should focus on delivering the objectives of the business. You have to ask yourself what those objectives are and have absolute clarity so that you can then measure impact from social media.

For example – if one of the business objectives is to improve lead generation – then there would be a mechanism created to deliver that.

Let’s say, that lead generation objective translates through to a campaign which is all about driving people to the website to fulfil a specific call to action to drive leads. In such a case, the website home page or specific landing page would have some call to action in place which entices users to engage with (eg: as we do via our free marketing plan or social media plan on the Carvill Creative home page) – and ultimately capture data.

To drive people to find the call to action, you are likely to embark on a number of activities: Adwords, SEO, Email, Newsletter promo, Email signatures and social media.  Not only sharing and promoting to those following you on Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn, but you could use social media to listen in and track keywords, capturing relevant conversations and directing those relevant people to your website to get the free whatever, they insert their details, you’ve captured data. Et voila, you can then measure how many ‘leads’ you’ve captured.

Providing there are some Analytics on your website, then you would be able to track exactly where traffic to your site is coming from, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn etc – and measure activity. Of course, you can also ask the user to tell you in the webform they complete to fulfil the call the action - ‘How did you hear about us.’

Many organisations get hooked on metrics such as the increase in Facebook likes or Twitter followers – but actually, if those metrics don’t matter to the end objective – then it’s futile measuring them.

Just as in good old fashioned marketing – a business should be measuring impact towards the business objective.

What you measure will totally depend on the objective you’ve set – and may differ from team to team.  For example – see diagram below.  You’ll see that the Online Reputation Team are concerned about ‘sentiment’ and measuring positive and negative statements about the brand / products or services. Whereby the Business Development Team are focused on measuring number of new fans / followers, competition signs ups, lead generation.

For our clients each month we do report on metrics such as:

• Number of followers
• Likes
• Klout score (online influence score – however, we’re looking at other metrics as we’re not convinced Klout is an indication of much actually).
• Website traffic / provenance
• Ranking
• Twitter grade
• Website grade

But if these metrics aren’t relevant to bottom line, then you’re not really measuring impact, but rather activity.

There’s an excellent book by @thebrandbuilder – aka Olivier Blanchard, ‘Social Media ROI’, which I highly recommend.

But to finish where I started... measure what matters.

Carvill Creative – the online visibility experts. A digital marketing agency based in Maidenhead, Berkshire.  Carvill Creative covers all aspects of online visibility – website effectiveness, social media marketing, social media management and social media training, user focused website planning and conversion focused website design.

Passionate about Online Visibility - creating an integrated approach across websites, blogs and social media platforms.