How exactly social media contributes to the company’s bottom line? Are dollars really hidden in the number of Tweets and Facebook Likes? Measures such as brand mentions, video shares and fan counts are straightforward, but what becomes really important is to understand the real impact of a brand’s social media presence
Adopting a perspective of establishing clear objectives that SMM campaign is set to achieve first, is helpful in understanding what metrics will be appropriate to measure the effectiveness and success of the program.
Oosterveer proposes a number of useful measurement categories for SMM campaigns:
Conversational Exchange is key measurement of engagement and interaction. By tracking the number and the type of responses to posts, marketers learn what topics resonate with their audiences and what approach is most effective in engaging them.
Reach measures the overall network of people who interact and engage with the brand.
Content Amplification measures the number of shares for each post, for example, re-tweets. This allows evaluating if brand’s posts gain momentum outside of immediate network.
Sentiment is the measure of feelings expressed by people toward the brand’s post.
Content Appreciation measure focuses specifically on the number of buttons that people select to express their appreciation for something, for example: Likes on Facebook or +1 on Google+ among others.
Measuring SMM campaigns should have both a short-term and a long-term orientation. While short-term orientation is tactical and corresponds with immediate results, long-term orientation is strategic and requires flexibility and adaptation to the evolving brand community.
10. Successful SMM Campaigns
• IKEA
o Objective: ENGAGE
o How: RIPPLE EFFECT
o What: FACEBOOK
o Result: User Generated Promotion
• Starbucks
o Objective: DRIVE PURCHASE
o How: TARGET & ENGAGE
o Result: 8000 participants -> 1.5M people
120,000 new customers
Measuring social media is one of the most widely discussed topics today. A common ambiguity arises when trying to understand how exactly social media contributes to the company’s bottom line. Are dollars really hidden in the number of Tweets and Facebook Likes? Mike Nierengarten encourages marketers to accept that measuring social media is difficult and requires effort. Measures such as brand mentions, video shares and fan counts are straightforward, but what becomes really important is to understand the real impact of a brand’s social media presence.
Prior to highlighting how to measure SMM campaigns, it is important to revisit the concept of consumer path to purchase. The typical stages like awareness, investigation, purchase, engagement, repurchase and finally loyalty are part of that process, and marketers tailor their communication campaigns accordingly. As such, every marketing campaign is set to meet a particular objective – would that be generating trial, or raising awareness and loyalty, repositioning the brand, or engaging consumers, among many others.
Fundamental to marketing campaigns is leveraging multiple tactical elements across many channels, and social media is one such channel, equipped with numerous tools that span from Facebook to blog, and has the potential to complement other channels.
We have all seen this landscape before. All can be great platforms for your business but the key is to understand these are merely tools to help you achieve your objectiveObjectives may include: Manage Customer ServiceUsing social media properties to manage customer service can greatly reduce the number of calls to your company’s customer service department, especially when companies utilize their customers to answer customer service issues. Customer Engagement OnsiteSocial media updates allow you to regularly engage with your customers. You can share a holiday promotion or the company’s latest blog post. Measure the impact of updates that direct users to your site by looking at onsite behavior from referral traffic from social media sites. IncreaseBrand LoyaltyA recent study published in the Harvard Business Review demonstrated that when customers became a fan of a local bakery, they went to the store 20% more frequently and were more likely to tell their friends about the bakery. Market ResearchSocial media is a direct channel to the consumer. Use this line of communication to learn more about your customer. Conduct surveys and polls on LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter. What do your customers like about your product? What do they dislike? What do they like about your competitors? Measure savings in market research costs.Increase VisibilityIncreases in brand or product mentions. What marketing efforts lead to spikes in visibility? Is this good visibility or bad visibility? Social media monitoring can help you identify influencers and brand evangelists and gain insight into customer feedback – powerful information that can be used to strengthen your brand.Increase SalesClearly, measuring sales from social media makes sense, but attributing those sales to social media can be difficult. What role did social media play in the buying process? Are visitors coming directly from Facebook or Twitter? Did a recommendation from a brand evangelist on Yelp lead them to buy your product? Customer surveys and web analytics can help provide the answer.
Meets a business objective: First and foremost, any marketing campaign or activity should match with a business objective, regardless of the tools being used.Encourage Member Interaction: The most successful social networking campaigns and efforts involve the audience.Offer a satisfying User Experience: This encompasses the overall experience of the campaign, the content and navigation items should be where expected, the language familiar to the audience, and overall look and feel of the site appeasing. Foster self-expression or communication: Members in social networks like to communicate with each other, or self-express. As a result, campaigns should satisfy these needs with the appropriate toolsCompany Participation:Enhance Value as Community participants: As more people contribute or interact with the campaign, the value is increased. This can be in the form of content that is created by the community, contests, voting, or games.Provide longer term utility: Successful campaigns have a longer term value, rather than a short term ‘disposble campaign”. These campaigns add value by being a useful application to the members, rather than just quick dose of entertainment.Integration with other marketing activities: Successful marketing campaigns aren’t single channel, in fact they utilizie multiple channels and mediums to enhance the overall activity. The same thing applies to marketing campaigns on social networks, those that are promoted from other locations such as (corporate websites, email newsletter, blogs, podcasts) outside fo the social network have a great chance for success.Quickly scale: Social networks are designed for information to quickly move from member to member, so campaigns that lean on these capabilities perform the best. These attributes known as Velocity, Viralness, and Spread are key.Maintain agility during the campaign: Social networks are living, breathing organisms made up of real people connecting with each other. Marketing campaigns also should share these attributes and show be flexible to change in-flight, yield to legitimate requests or complaints of the community. Those campaigns that reflect the same dynamic behavior as human interaction have a higher chance to be interacted –and accepted –by the community. (Submitted by Graham)
Furthermore, the performance of the previous tools should be monitored for validationHere we see a list of common metrics that a business may track On the previous slide we discussed various objectives that a company may pursue. Customer Engagement for example. With such an objective one might look to measure number of site visits, followers, number of comments posted, reviews etchttp://socialmediatoday.com/edwin-huertas/415368/social-analytics-your-social-media-marketing-campaign-workingConversational Exchange is the number of replies or comments to each post. This is a key metric that reveals engagement and interaction, the pillars of social networking. By tracking responses to your tweets, posts and status updates you’ll be able to get a better view of which topics resonate with your audiences and which approach is most effective in engaging them. You can then adjust your posts to get maximum interaction.Reach is the size of the network directly accessed by your posts. This is your primary audience, consisting of people who directly interact with your brand or take on the call to action. Earlier I mentioned that you shouldn’t focus solely on vanity metrics, and network size is one of these. But, when combined with other measurement points, these particular vanity metrics can be extremely useful. Reach, for example, when combined with conversational exchange allows you to prepare a launch pad for taking your campaigns viral. The larger your reach, the greater the potential for conversational exchanges to snowball into a huge groundswell.Content Amplification is the number of shares for each post. This measure takes advantage of the fact that each node on your network is itself the start of another network, and your posts and updates gain momentum by being shared outside your immediate network. On Twitter this takes the form of retweets.Sentiment is the feelings expressed by others toward your post or update. In reality sentiment is much harder to gauge and is not easily evident in social media. But by using tools such as Isis Toolbox, it is possible to approximate and monitor what people may be feeling toward your brand.Content Appreciation may easily be mistaken with sentiment, but it has a narrower field of focus. On Facebook it’s conveyed by the Like button. On Twitter, great content is designated as “favorites.” And on Google + people can hit the +1 button to express their appreciation.
Furthermore, the performance of the previous tools should be monitored for validationHere we see a list of common metrics that a business may track On the previous slide we discussed various objectives that a company may pursue. Customer Engagement for example. With such an objective one might look to measure number of site visits, followers, number of comments posted, reviews etc
Discussion of IKEAClearly defined objectiveClearly defined metrics
Discussion of IKEAClearly defined objectiveClearly defined metrics
Objective:Engage people in the opening of new IKEA store in MalmoObjective:Drive purchase of new retail coffee flavourReceived samples, get a free tall coffeein exchange
What is the goal? KPIs that are aligned with objectives Metrics that are aligned with those KPIsValidate results and make strategic adjustmentsIn conclusion, measuring SMM campaigns should have both a short-term and a long-term orientation. While short-term orientation is tactical and corresponds with immediate results, long-term orientation is strategic and requires flexibility and adaptation to the evolving brand community.