How to measure the effectiveness of a social media campaign is a topic that has spawned thousands of blog posts, many of which throw up a mathematical formula that would give Einstein pause to think.
One of the better ideas about how to measure social media was written by Mike Manuel titled Social Media Measurement Deconstructed. Mike basically says that you measure the effectiveness of a social media campaign by focusing on three things:
- Influence
- Engagement
- Reach
I agree that Engagement needs to be on the list. Engagement according to Mike consists of:
Engagement is about qualifying and quantifying participation. How you calculate and weigh various participation factors (e.g., a conversation, a blog post, comment, tweet), err gestures (e.g., a link, tag, photo), is ultimately up to you to define, but assuming you can successfully identify your influencers, agreeing on the participation criteria is fairly simple and will likely be a combination of things that in aggregate (over time) indicate just how engaged – or not – folks are with what you’re doing. The scorecard model works well for this.
Engagement has to be at the heart of any campaign matrix since Web 2.0 is based on conversational marketing and engaging the target audience. The biggest issue for many companies is narrowing the number of possible engagements to a manageable number.
While Mike uses Influence and Reach as the “other buckets” I think that the one criteria that is missing is conversion data. My personal bias is that I believe that all Social Media Campaigns ultimately have to be measured on whether they drive leads, sales or sign-ups.
How are you measuring your social media marketing campaigns?
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Yesterday a post of mine was linked too by 3 of the Technorati Top 100 blogs and although thats no digg homepage it still shows the social media side of things worked well
Engagement and Influence are two of the biggest ones, in my opinion. Conversion is also important, though it’s sometimes harder to measure.
Just because you aren’t getting sale directly from your social media campaigns (ex: an article making it to the Digg front page) doesn’t mean that people aren’t hearing about you as a result, and purchasing something later (i.e.: an indirect conversion).
The reason why Social Media Measurement has spawned such discussion is that “R” in ROI changes from campaign to campaign. Not everyone dives into Social Media to generate conversion. Many are there to listen to customers and improve products and better understand the marketplace. Others are there to change minds, educate the marketplace or simply inform. That’s why we are all gravitating to engagement and influence because we’re not all agreeing on what return to expect.
some great points about why engagement and influence are important metrics to use Katie and Adam.
David