Interesting article on econsultancy about how to successfully measure social media campaigns. Chris Lake who wrote the article takes an interesting approach in that he says:
Rather than focusing on the smaller, campaign-specific metrics, such as traffic from Twitter or the number of fans on Facebook, wouldn’t it be better to look at how it helps to shift the most important business KPIs, such as sales, profits, as well as customer retention and satisfaction rates? To do this effectively, you’ll need to give your social media strategy time. Like a good wine, it needs to breathe. In doing so you will be able to look at your overall business performance, as well as the performance of your social media campaigns over the duration.
I like this advice. It is too easy these days to throw up a Facebook campaign, churn through some money with no results and say that advertising on social networks does not work. Social marketing works best when brands engage with their audience. And to do that takes time!
The ten ways to measure the effects of social media campaign that Chris identified are:
- Traffic
- Interaction
- Sales
- Leads
- Search marketing
- Brand metrics
- PR
- Customer engagement
- Retention
- Profits
So many marketers get caught up on driving traffic that they forget the last couple of points. As mentioned earlier, I believe that successful social media marketing is customer engagement. By listening to customers, and letting them know that you are listening, you can improve your business, your products, and your levels of service.
If you are successful in engaging with your customer base then you should see an increase in customer retention. For the poster child of retention through social media, look no further than Zappas. Zappos has an active presence on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and MySpace. They will do close to $1billion in sales this year, with 75% of its orders coming from repeat customers.
Nice post. Zappos is great. I follow the CEO and he’s pretty cool…
Well vhy should social media be any different. We are not doing marketing for fun (alone), but to make conversions, sale and an extra dollar for the company.
Twitter is new, and it will perhaps take some new tracking tools to measure conversion rates on a twitter campaign. But I think you could get pretty far with the tools you allready have.
Good post on measuring the effectiveness of social media campaigns.
And one thing should not be forgotten, before you even start to engage in social networks with your brand: as for any other type of media you should have a PLAN! Social media might be an incredible tool for a company’s business, providing direct communication channels, customer insights and the ability to measure the effectiveness of conversations very closely.
But as we have a substantially growing number of social media platforms, participating can turn into a giant time waste, if you don’t have some sort of structure behind it.