In order to effectively use social media it is important to know how you will measure it’s success. Today is Social Media Day and the power of social media only lies in how likely it is to make someone act on the connections they make, the ideas they hear or the opportunities they see.
It helps to have clear objectives so you know when your social media is working. It also helps to narrow down what to measure. In some ways, the digital environment gives us too much to measure. We have boiled it down to a framework that outlines the 5 A’s of Social Media measurement, or alternatively, Five Ways to Measure Social Media.
Activity: This measure is all about what YOU do. Your activities are important to tack, but only so that you can benchmark them against results.
Attention. This measure is all about reach or “opportunities to see.” These are the easiest to measure and encompass numbers of likes, friends and visitors. More important is to look at these in relation to other measures, like competitors or growth curves.
Awareness. This measure is all about engagement with you. Engagement is one way to gauge the health of your channels. When you have healthy interchange with your followers and customers, you are more likely to have successful digital campaigns. Awareness measures include mentions, share of voice, referrals and % of followers engaged.
Attitudes. This measure is all about conversation about you. The sentiment of your community can be measured automatically, but machines are notoriously bad at capturing underlying meaning. It can also be captured with customer satisfaction surveys cross tabbed against social media use, loyalty, and repeat visits
Actions. This measure is all about what actions your audience takes. Action can be measured by looking at financial gains, customer costs and value, processes and innovation.
To read more about how to measure social media, check out this presentation put together for the Social Media Day of Houston conference.
Thanks, Kami – this is great info!
This is so important. I see so many companies and brands that seem to blindly invest in their social media presence, without ever measuring their ROI on that investment at any point. It confuses me greatly. It’s like they just assume it’s working… or maybe they’re just burying their head in the sand and don’t want to look…
Paul,
Thanks for your comment. I’m really glad to see that you sell a product that leads people back to a sales funnel. That is really useful for the small business owner out there. It’s a little more challenging for bigger brands who are looking for awareness metrics. They are also sometimes looking for reputational help. Those goals also need to be measured. ROI is only one part of the equation, but even if you feel like ROI is not your goal, you should be measuring more than just likes and friendships on social media.