The first rule in any marketing campaign is that you need to find a way to measure how effective it is in reaching consumers. That is true no matter the means of delivery—snail mail, radio, television, newspaper, email and/or social media.
Randall Craig, a Toronto-based social media marketing expert, said campaigns using Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and the like, can be measured through the following four approaches.
• In relation to plan. Craig said before embarking on a social media program, forecast the impact of your efforts. How many page views, likes, new connections, user-generated submissions, comments, tweets, retweets, or shares are you expecting? And in the real world, what are you expecting in terms of real-world change: decreased customer service phone or email volume, increased leads, or increased product sales?
"You do not need to forecast everything, just what is important to you and your organization. Forecasting specific numbers at the outset puts a stake in the ground, and improves accountability," he said.
• Change from prior period. As an alternative to the above, consider measuring growth over time. Be careful though, the growth number is only useful when the investment of time and budget are also compared over the same period. A 50% year-over-year growth in Twitter followers is meaningless if the work effort to achieve the growth grew by 200%.
• In relation to an industry benchmark. A 15% return might seem great, but if everyone else is getting 30%, then 15% is not very good at all. The social web has been around for a few years now, and benchmarks, common practices, and rules-of-thumb are just now starting to become more common.
• What is the business impact? It is far more powerful when a social media activity directly impacts a real business measure, which is something that is on the financial statements, either revenue or cost. Some examples would be increased sales due to a YouTube campaign, the effectiveness of Twitter to improve customer retention, or the reduction in recruitment fees when using LinkedIn.
One useful tool to use in conjunction with one of these approaches is to create a social media scorecard, highlighting your most critical measures. Not only will it keep you focused on achieving your results, the scorecard is a great way to communicate progress to your colleagues.
Craig stated, "While all four measurement approaches are valuable, business impact measures are by far the most valuable." If you are tracking relative to plan, to changes, or to industry benchmarks follow the measure back to the impact on the business itself. He asked that if it is not impacting the business, then why measure it at all?
