Measuring Social Media Success
April 28, 2010 – 9:47 pm
Social Media marketing has a major challenge which people see is how to measure it? My question to them is – Do they really have campaigns or strategies?
You will not find tangible items every time in social media marketing. But what you can do is – Define processes that can be measured. Social Media is not static and so as your plans and processes.
1. First Strike: Once you have started a campaign you must be getting some responses and replies. At this point of time the quality of response doesn’t matter. You are just ensuring your profile or blog is working.
2. Getting Replies: Once your profile or blog is ready and audience is listening it, now is the time to create an influence. Here feedback is very important. If people are visiting your blog or profile and not commenting then your content isn’t very social and you would be ending up loosing your viral references.
3. Useful replies: If you are getting replies favoring your content – negative or positive- matters most. Getting replies like “thanks for sharing “and “good work” confirms that you are doing things right. But getting comments, which add to the discussion and gives, a direction to the discussion thread is a better confirmation of your good work.
4. Increasing followers and readers: Targeting right followers is important rather than adding random people in your blog or profile. If targeted audience is chasing your blog or profile then it shows the value of your content.
5. Increasing scope: Is the scope of your conversation increasing or its just stick towards one subject? Catering audience of different subjects and directing them towards a same product or service is the key to a successful social media campaign. If you are selling a hybrid car then you must target, pollution, global warming, saving earth etc as a subject and direct them towards your top goal.
6. Referring: In any social network, there are people to talk to about a given subject. They are known as experts in that network. You should be able to count the number of people that name you as a resource that number should be increasing every week.
7. Quality of Network: The audience connecting to your network should be dynamic in nature and must be enthusiastic about the subject. They should have a healthy network of their own and must be actively participating. They should be able to communicate and must be related to your market direct or indirectly. This type of audience has two benefits – They can grow and they are measurable.
However the points mentioned are incomplete as social media is very dynamic. As it changes you have to derive your own metrics matching to your goals.