Social Media Club Sydney found a new home at Sydney's Arthouse Hotel on Monday night. Unfortunately the location overshadowed the speakers in many ways with
crowd chatter echoing around the high ceilings and hard surfaces.
Alcohol and a packed house combined to make listening to the speakers
difficult.
Despite challenging conditions, speakers Matt Granfield, Jye Smith and
last minute addition Paul Young offered some interesting insight's on
measuring social media success. The overriding point from all speakers
appeared to be that before engaging in social media, you should have
clearly defined goals and derived business objectives.
There two other key messages which seemed to resonate: Social media is measurable and search and social complement, not compete, each other.
Social media is measurable
To measure social media you first need to decide what you want to
achieve – driving traffic, promoting brand, engaging with customers,
qualified sales leads etc. Once you have set a clearly defined business
objective, you can set about using any number of metrics to measure the
effectiveness of your social media presence.
As an organisation you should look to ascertain what you are looking to achieve:
-
Get customers to engage with your brand
-
Drive traffic to your blog/website
-
Improve customer service through direct channels
-
Manage an online reputation
-
Drive sales
-
Increase awareness
These are all very different objectives and as such require different
measurement tools. As Jye Smith put it, you need to “measure with
context”.
There are a multitude of tools out there to measure social media
effectiveness. It's just a matter of putting together those that work
for your objectives.
Some metrics that can help measure success are:
-
Reach
-
Leads generated
-
Social media sentiment (has positive/negative voices changed over the campaign period)
-
Engagement (retweets, comments etc.)
Search and Social
Search and social are inextricably linked. Whilst many people may
focus on search as an entity in itself, it is important to remember
that the viral dissemination of your content can greatly increase the
number of inbound links. These inbound links boost your prominence in
search engines, and prominence in search engines aids discovery, which
can lead to sharing via social media.
Search and social are both about content discovery and to get the best
results from social media you must recognise that they complement, not
compete with each other.
Social Media Measurement Tools
There are literally thousands of tools out there that can help you
measure and track your social media, but here are a few to get you
started.
PeopleBrowsr for marketers - clunky but effective sentiment reporting
BackType - the conversation connection in BackType allows you to count
many of the social media comments and tweets connected to a URL.
Dialogix - tool shamelessly plugged by Matt Granfield on the night.
Digital Media is yet to get it’s hands dirty playing with the tool but it does look promising.
Url shortening with Google Analytics - you can use Google Analytics to track leads (and
conversions) from social media, with the aid of bookmarklets you can
even track traffic from Twitter. As per yesterday's post, using clicks
from URL shortening services is misleading and should be avoided.
Jye Smith also has a great list up here
