Measuring results and determining the return on investment can be a difficult task in social media.
However if you figure out how social fits within your company, know what you can measure, create measurable goals and objectives, and track diligently, you'll find the task gets much easier.
Jay Baer wrote a blog post a few years back – I know, I know it's old, but it's such a good post with great tips on the social media measurement process.
How Does Social Fit in With Your Company?
Before you can start measuring your social media efforts, you need to determine how social fits in with your company. How you use social will change the metrics that make sense for your organization.
Know What you Can Measure
Every company doesn't have access to the same metrics. "If you're an e-commerce company, you can measure different elements of your social program than you can if you're not an e-commerce company," says Baer. He suggests understanding what is possible and removing metrics that aren't relevant to your efforts.
ROI vs. Correlation
To determine the return on investment (ROI) the formula is the same – sales minus expenses, divided by expenses, expressed as a percentage.
However, this can be difficult with social media so you may want to take a look at how your efforts tie to business success over the long haul. "What you want to see is a situation where business success increased in lock step with social success (or slightly trailing social success). You can't prove that social caused that success, but it sure looks fishy," says Baer.
Create Measurable Objectives
In order to determine what to measure you first need to clearly define objectives and measureable outcomes. Be specific about your objectives. For example, increase engagement on Twitter by 10 percent each month or increase blog subscribers by 15 percent in six months. These follow the SMART goals – they are specific, measurable, actionable, realistic, and timed. They measure what you want to do, how you'll quantify it, and they give you a deadline.
Select Metrics
Pick metrics BEFORE you are deep in social media. Why? Because you don't want to pick metrics that support your position down the road. Baer suggests picking three metrics and "seeing how they 'fit' your company."
A few popular metrics include:
- Reach is the number of fans, followers, blog subscribers who have seen any given post. You may use this to gauge the size of your community.
- Engagement is fans and followers who are interacting with your post. It could be measured in retweets, comments, average time on site, bounce rate, clicks, shares, video views, number of downloads, and so on. It's anything that requires your audience to engage.
- Sentiment or the "emotional connection" between a brand and their audience. I personally take these with a grain of salt because I'm not so sure how accurate a computer is at determining sarcasm. However, you may want to measure the number of mentions with positive or negative sentiment.
- Referral traffic plays an important role in bringing online visibility to your website. For example, you can measure social media referral traffic to the number of sales aided by social media efforts.
- Share of voice refers to the number of conversations about your company versus your competitors. To calculate, divide the number of conversations or mentions of your brand by total number of conversations or mentions about other brands in your market. To get this data you can use free tools such as SocialMention or paid tools like Radian6.
If you integrate your social efforts with other marketing and communication strategies there are metrics you can easily track such as leads, converted leads, shortened sales cycle, improved margins, and increased fundraising.
Share the Data
To get your organization on board with your social media efforts, share your data. "Sharing your results will inspire the internal discussions and ideas necessary to take your program to the next level," says Baer.
Create a dashboard using excel to track and update your metrics on a weekly basis that way you can monitor trends and set goals for growth based on what is and isn't working.
While measuring your social media efforts may be difficult, it's important to track and measure your success. The metrics you use to determine your success on social media are the ones that make sense for your business. There isn't a one-size-fits-all formula.
Do you believe your social media marketing efforts are working?
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