A number of companies are using Social Media for marketing their brands or products. We have also had a number of discussions for running a successful social media campaign and to reach the expected results. But, the unanswered question remains in our mind i.e. How to measure the success of a social media campaign?
Yes! You got it right; we will be talking about the social media campaign measurement tools and techniques today. Companies often fail to measure the results of a social media campaign they run. The most obvious reason is that not many people know the right techniques or the measurement tools that should be used to calculate the benefit they gained with the help of the campaign they ran.
So, we need to make sure that we understand the actual meaning of Social Media Measurements for business. The best way to describe it for businesses is to keep a track of all the social activities performed on all social platforms in a way that determines the volume of online conversation for a brand or product.
The first thing you should know about Social Media Measurements is that they can be of two types:
On-Site Measurements:
These measurements are available on the social platforms you are using. For example: Facebook offers a thorough range of measurements for the customized application you are using for promoting the brand. These measurements include the traffic, users, demographic, number of shares, number of likes etc. In addition to the above data you can also get customized app specific details as per your requirement, which may include the number stories posted on the application, the number of votes received on the application, the number of contest entries and more.
Off-Site Measurement:
These measurements are frequently ignored by the companies, as the origins of such details are related to other social platforms than the one you are using. This concept can easily be understood through an example; suppose your company developed a customized Facebook application for a product, the users share the news on their Facebook wall as well as Tweet about it. The users who are redirected through Facebook are properly counted, but what about the users from Twitter? They are not counted, and this is the reason the off-site measurement concept developed so that the actual users landing from different social platforms can be properly counted and your measurements are correct to evaluate the application impact for your marketing efforts.
By combining these two (On-Site and Off-Site Measurements) you get the actual results for the social campaign. The importance of Off-Site Measurement can be judged by the case we recently faced. We (Cygnis Media) designed and developed an application for PAC12 Networks. While measuring the success rate of the campaign we came to know that it gained more than 60% users via Off-Site Measurements, which would have been completely ignored if we would have been reporting in the traditional manner.
That said, we think that you are now familiar with the Social Media Measurements you need to consider for evaluating the social campaign success rate. Now is the time to discuss how you would measure the social media campaign’s success:
1 – Set a Goal:
The very first thing you need to do is to set a goal for your social media campaign. The goals can be of two different types:
- Qualitative Goals: This includes brand awareness, influence, engagement etc.
- Quantitative Goals: This includes the web traffic, sales, SEO ranking etc.
2 – Set a Benchmark:
For identifying the success or failure of a social campaign, you need to have a standard to compare your actual results with. The benchmarks can vary from campaign to campaign i.e. for a contest application the ultimate goal of the campaign owner is to receive X number of contest entries. On the other hand, for a voting application the benchmark might be to receive X number of votes, and the list can go on depending on the nature of campaign you are about to start.
3 – Use your own site as a social hub:
The whole social media measurement concept cannot be fulfilled by just the social platforms metrics you are using. These social platforms are very effective to measure engagement and conversations, but are not optimized for conversions and purchases yet. The best thing to do in such cases is to use your own website as a measurement tool and to implement your strategy as per your requirement.
4 – Make sense of it:
The need for collecting the detailed information for your campaign is to know if your social media campaign is a success or a failure. You need to make sure that the information you receive through monitoring and the management efforts makes sense with respect to the ultimate goals set for the social campaign.
5 – Measure Social Interaction on your site:
When you step in the social marketing arena by throwing in a customized Facebook application to promote your brand or a product, this also emphasizes that your site would also be having more visitors than normal. Make sure you had set up the analytics for the social interactions you received from the site. Monitoring social engagement helps you combine the web and social metrics which provides you a better understanding about the users and the social channels.
CONCLUSION:
We know that there is no such thing as “one for all”, when we talk about the measurement of social media campaign. We also know that social media success measurement is still an infant and suffers from a lack of common metric standards, unlike the online advertisements platforms which have focused on a few key metrics (CPC, CPM or CPA etc.). The above list shared with you is what we think can be the best to find out the success of your social media campaign. Let us know, if you would like to add any of your suggestions on this list.
