Traditionally, the goal of all marketing communications and advertising has been to increase the bottom line. It basically says, if it doesn’t increase sales, it just isn’t worth doing. This is one of the reasons some people are skeptical about social media marketing.
There always seems to be a strong need to justify any strategic decision with results and numbers. When a brand is using social media marketing (SMM) as a part of its marketing strategy, it has to look beyond just the numbers. Wolfgang Jaegel in his presentation says, “you can’t approach new media with old thinking”. In case the SMM, the results aren’t always quantifiable. Having said that, it is always good to know how effective the campaign has been for you and what could be done to tweak it. For this, some amount of measurement is necessary.
There are a lot of conversations going on in the cyberspace about a brand, a company, a product. These take place either on social networking sites, blogs, chatrooms, various forums, basically any site or application that allows a dialogue. The brand would be driving traffic to it’s own website and some of the simple metrics that can be used to monitor this are -
- Unique visitors
- Page views per visitor
- Time spent on site
- Total time spent per user
- Frequency of visits
These alone however, do not give a very clear picture about the true effectiveness of a SMM campaign. Just an increase in traffic may not be something that you were looking to achieve and may not necessarily be a positive thing for your brand. Some additional metrics that can and should be used (as Michael Brito writes in his blog) are given below.
- Content Consumption – To find out where the visitors to the brand’s site are coming from, what content they are reading.
- Content Distribution – A measure of the number of visitors who are actually interacting with the content.
- Social Bookmarking – A measure of how many people are adding the brand’s site to social bookmarking sites like Del.icio.us, Reddit etc. Can be measured by tracking the number of users clicking on the social bookmarking icons.
- Subscribing to a RSS feed – A measure of how many of the readers subscribe to the brand’s RSS feeds.
- Emailing posts – To measure how many emails are being sent through the site’s form. Websites like wordpress offer this functionality.
- Who is talking about you – Gives a rough idea of which other sites are linking to the brand’s and therefore gives an insight into where else the brand is being discussed.
- Profile Engagement – If the brand has a social network profile, the number of friends on the brand’s site, total profile visits etc.
These metrics can be generated very easily using analytic tools that are freely available on the internet or by using Google analytics. Together, I believe these would give a good idea of the effectiveness of the SMM campaign.
