Social Media Measurement- Measuring the Success of Your Social Media Program
So here’s my thing with social media measurement – there are like 40 programs out there claiming they can help you measure social media, and not one that actually measures any of the
things our teams are reporting on. Every single one of these tools aggregates tweets and blog posts about your brand and then graphs
mentions of you and your competitors. But in my opinion, that is such a small, small piece of the puzzle and says nothing about how your social media strategy is directly increasing revenue. Here is my problem with this as a measurement for success of your social media strategy:
1. So there’s a lot of chatter about you in SM - How is that a reflection of your social media campaign? Was there a lot of chatter about your brand before you began social media? Could it be that the chatter is a result of a great PR hit, a new product, a new ad campaign? Is the chatter even really about you? How much of it is spam, or a misspelling, or an unrelated mention? Is it positive, neutral, or negative? Measuring overall volume of social mentions is interesting, sure, but it doesn’t actually tell you anything about how the dollars spent on your social media campaign is influencing your customers spending habits. Rather than a measurement of social media strategy, I see these tools that measure the volume of online chatter as a separate (albeit related) function of online reputation management (and one that should come with its own budget line item).
2. Comparing your share of voice to your competitors - Again, how is this a reflection of your success with social media strategy? So what if your competitor is getting 1,000 more tweets than you are. Are they doing anything about it? Are they engaging with these people? Perhaps they are receiving higher chatter because they are just downright more popular. Social media isn’t magic. If your company isn’t well liked then that will be reflected in a competitive analysis of the social space. Again, there are just too many variables at work here for it to be a true measure the success of your social media strategy.
Alternatively, for social media strategists, I’d recommend creating a social media audit (something we’ve done for several our social media clients) and updating this on a semi-regular basis. In this audit you identify top competitors and what these companies are doing in the social space. Then analyze the level of engagement they receive and the tactics they employ. This will give you direct insight into the changes you can make in your own programs and the success that these competitors are seeing as a result of their actions.
3. Finally, my biggest beef with these tools is that what they report are all things we have to gather anyway in the day-to-day execution. In order to run a successful social media campaign you have to be paying attention on a daily, real-time basis to info
directed to you, about you and about your competitors. We have various team members set up searches for terms (everything from our client’s name to broader searches like “things to do in San Diego”) and these people are tasked with assessing the needed level of engagement with what they find. Having a tool that I have to log in, and then sort through tons of spam isn’t efficient. Furthermore, when I run these searches directly in Facebook or on Twitter or in Google blog search, I don’t need to switch screens to respond.
Oh yea, and all these manual searches are free.
I feel that I should re-iterate that I think all of these tools are useful, I just don’t think they fall under the umbrella of social media strategy or reporting. I think these tools help with a larger analysis on company success. Additionally, I think that capturing this data should be part of a larger online brand/reputation management (complete with influencer outreach programs, blog comment strategy and quarterly reports to R&D about the online perception of your products and services). Is there overlap, yes. Is this something you can squeeze into current social media campaigns/budgets? In my opinion – no.
So what is it that I do want? I want a tool that helps save me time measuring the success of my strategy. A tool that actually speaks to ROI. I want a tool that easily aggregates everything I am measuring to show the direct result of the actions we are making in the social space. Specifically, I want a tool that pulls everything in and then makes graphs for me.
I want something that pulls in my number of fans, followers and visits to our blog. I’d like to see the number of comments, wall posts, fan photos @ replies, DM’s, RT’s and lists without having to login to each account to capture. I want a tool that auto refreshes Klout score and includes Tweetreach functionality to show the possible Twitter impressions per month. I want a program to pull from Google Analytics to tell me how much traffic came directly from Facebook and Twitter and I want it to tell me how many bitly click-throughs I got per month. Essentially I want all of this to happen without me, or anyone on my team, having to log in and count over and over and I want it all to happen in ONE place. For those few measurements of success that I may never be able to have aggregated (eg. number of redemption from social media contests) I’d like a tool to give me the functionality to add in these few exceptions and then auto graph them. This tool, a dream tool, would simplify reporting the amount of direct engagement with your brand, the increase of traffic attributed from social media, and the money spent as a result of a comprehensive social media strategy. I believe this tool would be a true measure of the success of your strategy, specifically, and could help agencies prove why their social media strategy services are valuable.
So, what do you think. Any programmers up for the challenge? Any social media marketers think they could use a tool like this?
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