One topic that comes up in conversation a lot is how to measure the effectiveness of a social media marketing campaign. There was a post recently on SEOmoz titled “Is Social Media ROI Unmeasurable?”.
The shot answer to that title is yes it is, and this is how we measurement internally the ROI of the social media campaigns we run.
Set Campaign Goals
Before you launch any campaign the first step is to always establish the goal(s) for the campaign. Is it to increase sales, visitors to a website, RSS subscribers, etc? Once you have the goals it is much easier to set up tracking. Note that none of the goals from any of our campaigns is to simply increase the number of followers or fans that we have on Facebook or Twitter. These are not goals that give you a good ROI!
So here are several potential Social Media campaign goals and how you can effectively measure them.
Increased Visitor Numbers
This is the easiest and more straightforward goal to measure. What you are asking is “Are there more visitors to my site now than there were before the campaign started?” By using a good analytics program you can quickly and easily break down the visitors by channel using referral data. Who are they? Where are they from?
Increased Revenue
This measurement is surprisingly easy to measure. What you are asking is “Is the business generating more revenue than before the campaign started?” To effectively measure the ROI of a social media campaign, you can use tools like social media only URL’s links or coupon codes that can only be seen on sites like Facebook or Twitter. Or campaign specific 800 phone numbers? These tools separate the sales from other channels and allow us to focus only on the increased revenue that came from social media.
Increased Links
Does the web site, or pages within the web site, have more links pointing to them than before the campaign started. Google Webmaster Central and Yahoo Site Explorer are good sources for before and after numbers.
Increased Brand Awareness
This is the favorite of marketing agencies as it is probably the most difficult aspect to measure. What you are asking here is that while the campaign was going on, were more people talking about your company and/or brand than before the campaign? Measuring buzz is difficult, but some different ways to measure it are mentions on Twitter, Buzz Metrics, and Blog Pulse.
What are you using to measure the effecitiveness of your socal media campaigns?
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Millions of people to connect with all over the world — but how do make your Tweets, micro-blogs and Facebook updates rise over the din and make a strong impact on future customers?
How do you muster up the energy to keep collecting hundreds of friends each day, and then crank out a marketing message that guarantees that “Can’t Stop Looking” effect?
The answer is you can’t. It’s impossible to pull of what it takes to do the legwork effectively and see real results from social networking for business.
Social media is one of the most effective techniques nowadays on creating branding and buzz over the net. We all know the lot of people has their account on social media sites. And this is one way to connect to your targeted markets.
Companies and executives are finally beginning to really jump on the social media bandwagon, and that’s fantastic.
These are great starting points for measurement, but to compute an accurate ROI, you really need to take a broader look at your business metrics. I strongly recommend this presentation about Social Media ROI:
http://www.damniwish.com/2009/09/how-to-measure-social-media.html