How Do You Measure Social Media Marketing? - Metrics And Analysis

Social marketing enables marketers to take engagement to the next level. It’s about having a dialogue in which consumers and marketers alike participate and respond. Marketing in this medium is a return to old-fashioned communication that occurs in digital forums.

Social Marketing allows us to Connect With Customers

So given most would agree that SMM is about communication and engagement, does it make sense to use more traditional digital measures like:

• Unique visitors
• Time spent on site
• Total time spent per user
• Frequency of visits
• Depth of visit
• Conversions

I would argue that these measures work for banners on a website but don’t do much to understand and explain the performance of a SMM campaign. Measurements of customer satisfaction, engagement, loyalty and participation seem more appropriate for online social activities, but how can these areas of goodwill be measured? And more importantly, how do these relate to the success of a campaign or a community?

There is not any generally accepted metrics for marketers to determine whether or not a social media program is ‘effective’ or not. This largely depends on the company’s social media objectives and these tend to differ dramatically based on the organization. However, that doesn’t mean we can’t measure ROI at the campaign level and I have listed a few ways to consider measuring social media marketing campaigns:

• traffic (uniques and page views)
• stickiness (subscriptions via email and RSS, as well as direct return visitors),
• visibility (links, search rankings and long-tail traffic),
• viralness (brand awareness or consumer mindshare),
• engagement (comments across different sites, demographic/usability surveys and polls),
• income (advertising, sales, and other conversions).

Last thoughts

The key takeaway of this post is regardless of how your company chooses to measure SMM, it is that you have a success metric in mind before you begin the campaign. Without some sort of starting objective, it’s impossible to determine your ROI (and success criteria). If you want to read some more about this from others in the blogosphere then check out Dave Evens, and his post: Social Media Metrics or an interesting post by Christopher Kenton, (with the same name) Social Media Metrics.

I look forward to your thoughts about this increasing important topic. Also interested in your views on tools that can be used by marketers to capture these metrics. SinoTech Group has one for China but I would like to get other listed then we can do a review and recommend post in the coming week.

Also dont forget to check out my of my posts on: Digital Marketing Inner Circle