The most important thing in riding the social media wave is that businesses must develop a social media marketing strategy; here and here are two great resources. The second and equally important aspect, which is most often easily looked over, is measurement. Here are six essential metrics every business should pay attention to in order to measure the success of one’s social media marketing strategy:
1. As the popular social networking website, it is vital to track how frequently your fans interact with your Facebook fan page by clicking ‘like’ and commenting on status updates. When fans do so, it’ll appear in their newsfeed and expand your marketing reach not just by their immediate group of friends, but also by friends of friends that interact with you fan page, and so forth. As the administrator of a fan page, you can track this data as a chart on your Daily Story Feedback at https://facebook.com/insights. Be sure to check this every day.
2. Klout, also known as ‘the Standard of Influence,’ measures influence on Twitter. Klout goes beyond charting your followers. Instead, it examines retweets, followers, clicks on links, etc, and gives you a score that reflects your influence within your social sphere.
3. PostRank. Your social media savvy readers can interact with your blog through various mediums such as through Digg submissions, retweets, or Facebook shares. But these very diverse mediums make it difficult to impose some sort of measurement for social media marketing success. Enter PostRank, which consolidates the different ways your readers are interacting with your blog, and it gives you an ‘engagement score.’ This is useful in seeing which of your blog content is generating engagement with your audience.
4. Start a ‘share of voice’ report. Radian6, ViralHeat, and Social Mention are great Web sites for this. A ‘share of voice’ report measures the number of times your business/products/services are mentioned on the social web whether in positive, neutral, or negative vain. And the great part is, you can calculate your competitors ‘share of voice’ report and see who’s more discussed about, whether good or bad.
5. Google Insights. Since Google is the most widely used search engine, a measure of the number of people searching your company on Google is very important. In 2009, research conducted by GroupM found that “consumers exposed to a brand in social media are subsequently 2.8 times more likely to search for that brand than are consumers unexposed within social media.” Use Google Insights to measure your searchability on Google and draw inferences on the success of your social media marketing campaigns.
6. Inbound Links. Websites that link back to yours is the providence of SEO, and social media is the best place to accrue links. It’ll promote your website higher up on Google. Keep track of the number of websites linking back to yours with either Open Site Explorer or SEOmoz
At the very least, these are six essential metrics on measuring the success of your social media strategy, so develop fluency in them. What are some other useful metrics you’ve used to measure your social media strategy – please share.
Written By: Jaszver Bauzon