The Metrics of Social Media
There’s an interesting post over at the Canadian Marketing Association blog today called “Measuring Social Media”, written by Jim Estill, who’s on the board of BlackBerry makers RIM.
It suggests that brand awareness is the new measuring stick of a successful marketing campaign, and that only the first set of eyeballs are the ones you pay for – everything after that is word of mouth.
It’s also a follow-up piece to an earlier article Jim wrote suggesting that ROI (return on investment) on marketing is a bogus term.
While they’re both interesting reads with some valid (and not so valid) points, the idea that ROI and metrics are difficult to measure isn’t quite true. Nor should you only be measuring by brand awareness (although this is definitely a measurement gauge for social media).
In fact, social media can offer some of the best metrics for ROI around. All you need to do is set your success guides – what you want to achieve and how long you want to spend achieving it – and then measure your results against that.
Blogger Outreach
A key component to many (if not most) social media campaigns, blogger outreach programs can offer some of the best mileage and results of any marketing tool. Measuring your success isn’t too difficult, either:
- How many bloggers wrote about you?
- How many comments did these posts receive?
- How many social shares did the post get?
- What was your traffic pre- and post-outreach?
- How much product did you have to provide for bloggers versus how many sales did you receive?
One of the darlings for any product launch, service or business, Twitter not only offers instant eyeballs but great returns as well. Again, measuring your impact is relatively simple:
- What was your retweet value?
- How often was your hashtag used?
- How many times was your vanity URL used?
- How many new (genuine) followers did you get while your promotion was on?
- If you used something like Sponsored Tweets, what was the cost versus click-through and conversion?
Fast becoming the key destination for many businesses and their products, Facebook offers some great built-in tools as well as demographic options to help gauge a campaign:
- How many new fans did you make over how many you targeted?
- How many times was your promotion message liked?
- If you built a Facebook application, how many times was it installed/shared?
- Were you successful reaching your target demographic (Facebook Insights can help you here)?
- How much did you spend on a Facebook ad and how did click-throughs and new sales/customers compare?
YouTube and Video Sites
More than just a fun place to see kids hurt themselves on bikes, YouTube is a key tool in any marketing campaign now – just ask the companies that used it to such effect during this year’s Super Bowl. Questions to ask:
- How many views did you get?
- How many Likes and Favourites did you receive?
- How many downloads did you get (on video sites that allow downloads)?
- How many embeds has your video seen elsewhere on the web?
- How many subscribers did your channel attract?
- If your video had a call to action with a vanity URL, how many times did this happen?
- How many social shares did you get?
Mobile
As marketing evolves, so the different ways to reach an audience combine. Mobile marketing is the perfect complement to social marketing and measurement can easily be achieved:
- Did you use a push SMS system to drive traffic to a mobile-friendly site? If so, how many views did that account for?
- Did you use QR codes, and if so, how many times were they used?
- How many downloads did your mobile app receive?
- How many check-ins were used on Gowalla and Foursquare?
- What was the most popular operating system (this can tell you a lot about your audience’s demographic and buying options)?
These are just some of the immediate ways you can measure how successful your goals were met. There are more still – monitoring tools and more defined analytics are other ways. It all depends how your goals are set and how you define success. Then compare man hours and financial outlay versus return to see how successful you were.
The point is, a lot of marketing can come down to luck and circumstance as much as brilliant strategy. I’ve seen some great campaigns flounder while crap ones succeed – timing and a welcoming audience are key.
However, one thing you can control is measurement. And with social media and mobile marketing, measuring metrics has never been easier.
How about you – how are you measuring your campaigns and defining success?
45 Responses to “The Metrics of Social Media”
Agreed – not every campaign is about hard numbers. At least not at that time. But somewhere down the line, that sentiment has to relate to hard numbers (financially), as positive sentiment will only take you so far and unfortunately doesn’t pay the bills.
Couldn’t agree more about building a community around your product, company or service. But again, some of that will still need to transfer to hard numbers – otherwise you won’t be in business very long.
Cheers for your thoughts, always appreciated, and look forward to reading your post.
Sheldon – I believe that sentiment can often be measured in hard numbers – likes and retweets, for example. Both express some degree of two factors:
1. How folks feel about the content.
2. The loyalty of your community.
.-= John Haydon´s most recent blog post …How to collect email subscribers on your Facebook Page =-.You are both absolutely correct.
Hard numbers and turning your social media strategy into money is definitely the ultimate goal. As well, a lot of sentiment can completely be turned into hard numbers. Even something like a content analysis of comments can be turned into these numbers.
I just wanted to say that I think too many people focus on things like hits to a webpage or views on youtube. The problem with that is people could be viewing these pages for bad reasons as well as good.
To properly figure the ROI of a campaign the creators need to come up with a combination of these hard hard numbers and sentiment measurements.
.-= 40deuce´s most recent blog post …My 3 I’s for a Social Media Campaign =-.Bad reasons can also be used, though (and often more than positive sentiment). Why didn’t your strategy work? Did it piss people off, and why?
Look at the ads from various companies at the Super Bowl. Without exception, they polarized opinions. Can companies take that difference of opinion and decide whether to change tactics the next time, or tweak a current campaign for a new push?
They can and do – how well they do it comes from how they use the metrics.
You can combine the results of sentiment and financial return, which again will help future campaigns.
Say Campaign X receives 3,000 retweets, 70 blog posts, 1,000 Facebook fans and 3 million YouTube views, with 100,000 website page hits. It cost $50,000 of man hours and marketing spend to achieve that.
Divide the sentiment by the investment and then multiply by sales. That should give you a decent ratio to work from on future campaigns, or if the results don’t warrant further interest.
Goals are probably the first step. For example, if the goal is to get 300,000 people to sign a petition, then hits on the petition page would an important metric, in addition to the number of people signing the petition. However, we’d want to know where those hits are coming from. Data like bounce rate may not be a critical measure because we just want folks to sign the petition. If they read other stuff on the site, that’s great, but it’s probably not a critical measurement.
At the same time, with a big push to get signups, we might want to measure some degree of sentiment. We’d want to know if people aren’t happy with the push in general. A good example of this is the Chase Bank Social Good campaign – they were getting lot’s of engagement, but also a lot of criticism.
.-= John Haydon´s most recent blog post …How to collect email subscribers on your Facebook Page =-.
Hi, Danny. This is great stuff. The thing we struggle with, though, is that while all of these metrics are meaningful to us, and clients understand the concepts of engaging and community building, at the end of the day they want to see how these metrics track through to REAL ROI at the cash register. What are your thoughts on how to track that through?
Sue
Hey there Sue,
That’s where your call-to-action comes into play. The vanity URL or QR codes (or the SMS push) leads to a dedicated landing page for your promo, where you can buy product or services.
Or if it’s brick and mortar sales needed offline, scan a QR code from an ad and it relates to sales offers in-store (or a 2-for-1 movie offer, or meal, or similar). Or print a coupon from Facebook, or your bloggers or similar.
Of course, not all sales or returns will be immediate – yet this is still something that can be measured. Say a promo got you 1,000 new Facebook fans. You offer a later promo exclusively via Facebook – you can then see how many of these early fans buy, and add that to the return of the initial campaign.
As long as you have some kind of dedicated call-to-action that leads to a sale and financial return, that’s where your tracking comes in.
Hi Danny
Totally agree,the metrics available for social media marketing are something that was not even considered 5 years ago or even 2. The ability to measure the buzz and ROI of social media is maturing every day. Great post.
Cheers
Jeff
.-= Jeff Bullas´s most recent blog post …Is Blogging The Future Of Publishing? =-.I recall working with a client in 2006, and trying to collate information from a combined coupon and radio ad. Happy days…
I always enjoy the ROI and measurement debate as it applies to social media or PR as a whole. I agree that with the proper guides there is a multitude of ways to measure your social engagement (as noted in your post). The biggest challenge is the fact that most organizations apply the wrong measurements to these communications vehicles. For example, most website managers are measured by pure traffic – not engagement. PR or media relations managers are using absurd measurements still like advertising equivalency or circulation/reach numbers – not measure who actually read the story.
As it applies to both social engagement and PR, I strongly encourage folks to quickly figure out how your communications effort affects the company’s bottom line. In other words, figure out how to arm the sales, HR, customer service teams internally with this valuable conversation and engagement so they can turn it into sales, happy or new employees, and valuable customer experiences.
Great subject and obviously one I am very passionate about! Thanks Danny.
Matt (@storyassistant)
That’s a great point, Matt. We can put all the great measurement points in place for any campaign, but if you’re still getting different teams fracturing the information, you’re soon going to lose the initiative and be back to square one when it comes to debriefing and planning for the next step.
Great to see you around here, my friend
Best blog post picture ever!
.-= Michael Martine´s most recent blog post …Open Discussion: Does Marketing Ruin Everything? =-.Well thank you kindly sir – I kinda like it too!
Enjoying the discussion here… sure is interesting to observe the evolution of ROI metrics in social media.
Take Facebook for example: I’ve noticed that since Facebook is offering insights on impressions, marketers are now using use those impressions to compare to industry CPM’s in order to justify social media expenses.
Although that’s a reasonable part of the equation, I’d say it misses the bigger picture (and therein lies the paradigm shift of social media marketing).
Sticking to my example, looking at impressions reporting in Facebook doesn’t take into account the indirect impressions from the sharing that naturally results in the network. It also doesn’t address the power of growing a fan base that can continually be engaged without additional comparative costs over time.
Anyway, I appreciate all thoughts from you and the folks commenting. Thanks for the post!
Jason Cormier,
Room 214
.-= Jason Cormier´s most recent blog post …Who Takes The Blame For The Internet Overshare? =-.Great points, Jason. Facebook Insights is definitely a step in the right direction (particularly for businesses not too used to drill deep analytics of a campaign), but they’re still just a very basic overview of the bigger story.
The long tail is where the real success is gauged – that’s where sentiment, analysis, metrics and more need to be studied, measured, acted upon and improved for future messages.
Cheers for stopping by!
I think the reason why many people say it is hard to measure ROI in social media because currently it is difficult to do so – there are very few tools that do this and automate it. Right now, we’re working on a tool for this, hopefully to be released in the beginning of June.
Yet therein lies another problem, Cassie – would a tool or platform be able to automate every single part of analytics? I think that would be hard, no? Every campaign is different, so inputting all the measurements and yardsticks (and the ad-hoc ones that might pop up along the way) would need an incredible piece of software/hardware, which would feasibly be too expensive for most?
Look forward to seeing what you’re working on – be sure to give me a heads-up when it’s near release? Would love to run a test on it if possible?
Great food for thought in this piece. It makes me wonder how many organizations don’t bother to define success even if they do measure the results? Or if the definition of their success is something too vague, like ‘increase brand awareness’?
And I love the bluntness in this gem: “a lot of marketing can come down to luck and circumstance as much as brilliant strategy.”
I once sat down with a client (prior to winning their business) and asked how successful their social efforts so far had been.
Their response: “Great. We sold some widgets.”
I asked how many; where about; was it the amount they expected; what was the next step, etc, among other questions.
Sadly they didn’t know. They just knew they’d sold some widgets but weren’t sure what platform had been the successful one.
That’s where we need to better educate our clients and stop offering them BS terms. We all know the why; let’s start kicking the butt of the how.
Cheers!
Thanks for the great post! I am trying to get a good idea of what a good percentage of engagement is when it comes to facebook. Any suggestions? (We are trending about 20% of our fans checking in with the page daily.) As you know, in social media, it is not the size of the network but the number of people actively participating within the network.
It depends on your take. Is 20% more than you’d see a return on with print or email? How much of that 20% physically interacts (as in buys or recommends to buy to their networks)?
You could have 1% trend, but if that 1% transfers to 1,000 people, you’re not doing too badly. Then you just have to see why they’re interacting more than others (demographics, geography, time of day, etc), and see if you can transfer that to the lurkers.
Cheers!
@Danny
Not entirely relevant but Danny, how useful are Facebook pages for smaller brands, small businesses? The engagement factor is fine, but how easy or tough is to build a significant community on facebook if you are not a Coke or Starbucks.
@Kartek It depends on your goals. Is the Facebook Page to be a traffic driver to your main site, or is it to be a separate entity of its own to help grow business and leads as well as relationships?
At Bonsai, our page is a mix of interaction, fun and business potentials:
http://facebook.com/bonsaiinteractive
One of our clients is a small business and they’re using their Facebook Page to connect with local buyers for their products, as well as globally for their e-commerce store:
http://www.facebook.com/canadianpetconnection
They’re doing a great job with it too, with offers exclusive to Facebook fans.
So there’s definite use in smaller businesses using pages – it just needs a strategy.
@DannyBrown i absolutely see a relevance, but I was just wondering how easy is it to build a community, attract ‘fans’. Twitter is far easier, we tweet, we use hashtags, we browse through wefollows and ilk. Do you suggest any metrics wrt size for a Facebook fan page?
Cheers
@Kartek Again it really depends on your goal. But here’s a metric for a Facebook exclusive I carried out earlier this year that might interest you:
http://dannybrown.me/2010/06/10/experiment-platform-exclusive-content-metrics/
It all comes down to setting a goal, continuing to be interactive on the Page itself, and building from there.
Marketing is going to keep evolving with the creation of newer technologies. Hulu went from being a 1 – 30second commercial per episode site, so a full on broadcast network these days. But marketing isn’t about focusing on target groups anymore, but about bringing target groups to marketing. Commercials and advertising are now linked to customers based up their interests. The American Eagle billboard in Times Square gives regular customers their 15 seconds of fame, by putting them up throughout the day. It is interesting to see it shift.
There is an interview series of social media experts discussing some of the current trends and changes in social media, that you might enjoy.
http://www.ourblook.com/topic/social_media.htmlHi Danny,
First of all thanks for the great post..
I want to point on something:
• Facebook Fans
• Facebook likes
• Retweets
• Twitter Followers
• Youtube Views
• Blogger Blogging about
• Comments
• Blog/Web Traffic
• Etc..All of these are not ROI, these are non-financial results …ROI is Return On Investment Not Return On Impact Or Impression..With all my respect to any social media guru in these days if any one says the above mentioned is ROI Then they are lying and the truth is that they don’t know how to calculate it, that’s the truth…Word of mouth, Like, Retweets, Comments how can anyone measure these things($ sign)???
Let me clear it more I don’t say the above are not important..No they are essential but the ROI doesn’t live there it lives in sales increase, costs decrease, and revenues increase..(Really Money)
If we speak about Social Media ROI we should distinguish between Non-Financial Results and Financial ones..
Best Regards,
Hi Firas,
Have to disagree with you here (obviously). First, for the reasons mentioned in this comment:
http://dannybrown.me/2010/05/12/metrics-of-social-media/#comment-20694
Secondly, for the simple fact that like any solid campaign, results are not always immediate – you build for long-term. Yes, you can go for the instant return of a $5 million ad during the Superbowl, but as the Old Spice TV ads have shown, financial success isn’t guaranteed by early buzz.
Say you raise brand awareness 1,000%. Say you only get 10% of the return back initially. That’s a failure? It depends – are you looking for instant sales or long-term business?
If it’s the second option, then let’s say half of that 1,000% increase buys within the following 6 months, bringing in $1 million of sales.
Is the ROI of the sentiment then worthless because it came 6 months down the line, as opposed to the initial push?
If you’re just in business for the quick hit, you’re going to lose pretty quickly.
And for the record, calling someone a liar because you don’t agree with their point of view might be viewed as short-sighted. Just my two cents.
Cheers for your thoughts, though, much appreciated.
It is Deep-Sighted not short one…I didn’t say it is a failure..I clearly mentioned that these are not financial results once when you deal with ROI you should look for money not mention…I agree that all the above can lead to:
New customers
Increase customers loyalty
Increase purchase frequency
Build brand awareness
Decrease costs..
But what I don’t agree on saying the above are ROI…
I am not new in the business and I’m a group CEO besides many years of financial knowledge and positions.
A person can convince an entry-level employee with the above but if an executive ask after three months campaign WHAT’S THE ROI “I PUT THIS AMOUNT HOW MUCH I GOT BACK” Money For Money. Not traffic, not comments, not tweets, not likes…
The above non-financial results may lead for sales and may not!!!
Once speaking about ROI it is important to have courage and say it is not something easy and that it needs a plan and strategy..
In Business world there is nothing named “say you got or assume you’ll get sales so and so”..There should accurate numbers if you are a businessman you know what I mean it is not lottery..;)
No assumptions numbers money in the bank..@Firas Abo Assaf But ma friend an ROI is something in the conventional sense, no ad campaign or superbowls could guarantee, do they? all we in the communication business try to do is build perceptions, capture attention and build an opinion. Thats what PR does and advt does in a different perspective.
Its unfair we forget about ROI in million dollar ad cmapaigns and keep harping over financial metrics.
And more so when Social media’s greatest objective is to engage and connect with your audience, not to SEll!
what say?
I think that these ideas are a good jumping off point for measuring your success in social media, but I think you’re missing something very important here.
A lot of these things represent hard numbers, which of course companies love to see. They love to know people are clicking their links and seeing their stuff, but just because someone sees something doesn’t mean it worked.
I think sentiment should play an even larger factor than some of these hard numbers. Just because someone saw something doesn’t mean it had an effect on them. Yes, if you see your sales rise then you can say it had a positive effect, but not every campaign is about generating sales right then and there.
Social media also has to do with creating a community. One that will support a current campaign, but also everything you do in the future.
I’m actually currently working on a blog post about the meaning of comments in a blog that touches on the same subject. Clicks to the site are one form of measurement, but the sentiment revealed from the readers about what they read can be worth so much more.
This my opinion anyways.
.-= 40deuce´s most recent blog post …My 3 I’s for a Social Media Campaign =-.