Have you asked yourself this question; how do I measure social media marketing? Are you concerned with how you learn the metrics to measure your social media campaign? Don’t worry because there are tools available to help you measure the success or failure of a campaign. Social marketers typically launch marketing campaigns and tend to overlook or unintentionally ignore the metrics during the planning stage.
More often than not, the reason they ignore these all important metrics is because they’re not sure what metrics they should be considering. They’re not certain what factor (in their campaign) creates the value that leads to profits. Social marketing metrics create significantly more burdens for brand marketers than any other marketing channel today.
Partly it’s because they find that metrics are hard to prove in general and even harder to prove to the C level executives who rely on metrics to continue any campaign. In business marketing, you have to make more than or at least equal to the dollar invested in advertising in order of marketing to be considered successful or adequate. If this isn’t the case or as you find with social marketing at times (not specifically provable) its value comes into question.
Regardless of whether you’re using a traditional or social media marketing approach, you need to measure the results for each venue, or in social each marketing platform. In social media marketing you need to meet the engagement requirements of the platform itself before you can successfully analyze the metrics. Traditional ROI measurements are no longer viable. They’ve been replaced by the shift into a person’s real-life and real-time social interactions.
So how do you translate traditional ROI metrics in social media?
As you well know, traditional ROI was determined by calculating how much profit was made after an investment. However, social media has changed the traditional ROI measurements and requires that each social media campaign be assessed individually on various metrics. Great examples of the various metrics are the five outlined by Brian Solis of Altimeter:
- Return on engagement – measuring the duration of time spent either in conversation or interacting with social objects, and what may have transpired that’s worthy of measurement.
- Return on participation – measuring and valuing the time spent participating in social media through conversations or the creation of social objects.
- Return on involvement: – similar to participation, measuring the touch points for documenting states of interaction and tie in metrics and the potential return of each.
- Return on attention – engagement is ultimately a real measurement of effectiveness. Assess the means to seize attention, hold it, and measure the response.
- Return on trust: An alternative method for measuring customer loyalty and the likelihood for obtaining referrals. It’s a trust barometer that establishes the state of trust earned in social media engagement, generating advocacy and how it impacts future business.
Understanding these participation metrics give you the opportunity to learn and create content that is marketable to your audience based on what they respond to. In a 2011, a survey conducted by eMarketer which evaluated the metrics used by marketers globally, determined that traffic, positive mentions, page views, and contributors were how marketers measured the value of their social media campaigns.
In fact, the most significant change in metrics were the increase of 33 percent from 2010 to 2011 for conversion and following relatively close was the 20 percent increase in revenue from 2010 to 2011. These are the measurements that the C-suite needs confirmation of in order to continue and approve of the social marketing campaigns.
Source: www.clickz.com
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