Social Media: Measure Twice, Run Once
How do you measure the success of your social media campaigns? What is your plan for building profitable relationships in 2010 (and beyond)?
There’s so much noise online today about ‘being in social media’ and no small amount of disappointment when people don’t build their criteria for success before jumping onto social networks.
Here’s a roadmap that I use to build social media strategies, deploy them across multiple channels, and test their ROI for clients (feel free to share your opinions, likes and dislikes in the comments section below)…
You Can’t Be Everything to Everyone…So Don’t Try
Question: Why doesn’t McDonald’s sell New York Strip steaks?
Answer: The McDonald’s corporation has a clearly defined goal — buy valuable real estate in high traffic areas across the globe and sell inexpensive food products in such a volume that provides sufficient rental income for the franchisee to pay McDonald’s (what, you thought McDonald’s was a food company instead of a real estate conglomerate?).
McDonald’s knows exactly what they need to achieve in terms of same store sales, new product marketing and pricing, and ROI from their advertising to make shareholders happy and increase cash flow every single quarter…so what’s holding you back from doing the same?
Kick-starting your social media measurement begins with some very simple questions. Here are a few conversation starters I ask clients:
- What is your overall goal? (More Sales, Increased Exposure, Product Development, All of the Above)
- How is your sales channel designed to convert visitors into customers?
- How can you provide fans/followers/customers with a way to discuss and promote your (*speak and share stories about*) business or brand?
- Summits/Conferences: How can we position your business to host a meeting that provides value either to colleagues in your industry or potential customers?
- What is a realistic amount of time you are willing to devote to continuing social media activities?
- How are you bridging your online activity with real world networking?
- What is your plan of attack for capturing information (list building) and how will feedback guide the conversations you decide to take part in?
- How are you planning for the boom in mobile devices?
- How are you building buzz about your business, products, services, and brand in good times and bad?
The point of all these questions is to spark a curiosity inside the minds of the people who want to become successful using the social web. It all starts by defining a clients expectations and helping them realize they hold tremendous power — the power to start meaningful conversations.
Social Media Data Served Fast and Fresh
After defining your goal and beginning to deploy your content on the social web, you need to monitor your campaigns on a daily basis (if that’s not possible, then the quicker the better).
Habits and attitudes change quickly so it’s important to know where sentiment is heading (we’re talking about tools like Social Mention and BackTweets, but also hard data like Google Analytics and AdWords).
You could say we’re coming down to brass tacks. This is the point where we determine the success of the social media plan according to:
- Number of AdWords and Social Media Conversions (Using A|B Testing)
- ‘Chatter on the Wire’ (Increase in conversations by each social network)
- ROI — sales directly linked to social campaigns (careful, you won’t be able to quantify anywhere near 100% of these, still, any trackable metrics are good to have)
This post isn’t a complete deconstruction of measuring your social media campaigns, it’s just some food for thought to get you moving in the right direction. The bottom line is that if you take your social media presence seriously and begin to think of the aspects you do have some control over — the measureables — you’ll be surprised how many goals you can achieve.
Remember to stay curious! …