How Do I Measure and Track The Success of My Social Media Marketing Strategy?
When tracking your success of any social media marketing one key element is to set your goals first. For each organization or company there will be separated goals and reasons for engaging within social media. This channel has matured to the point where there are a couple of core success points for engaging. Some items that are important to measure for success are direct sales from social media, prospects and leads, mentions and conversation, and sentiment.
Social media is the largest word of mouth platform on the planet. So while its important to measure direct results such as sales and leads there is still an element of buzz that plays a role here as well. Customer service is another such item that is often overlooked when we talk about social networking. To learn more about what is important in social media marketing view our in-depth article about tracking in social media marketing or select the individual item below:
Social media is a different type of marketing platform, and contains elements of customer service and word of mouth marketing it’s important to not define a rigid marketing strategy.
When we talk about a fluid strategy this involves understanding each individual channel and how it plays a role in your overall goals and strategy. When we say channel we mean twitter as a channel, Facebook as a channel, and YouTube as a channel—keep in mind that each one of these channels might have separate channels as well.
For instance, you might have two Facebook pages one centered on your corporate brand and one centered and on a specific product. Doing this allows you to segment your efforts, your conversations, and your audience.
Listen and Engage
Another important element of marketing within social media is to listen. Most social networks are open nature it’s easy for you define your target market and see conversations that are already happening. Your goal here is to listen and define how your target market interacts with Brands and each other.
Once you’ve a deep understanding of what type of content resonates with your target market it’s time to engage. While well beyond the scope of this article we thought it was important that we mention these items before we move on to how to track measure success with your social media strategy.
You will find quite a few gray articles in are learning center that talk about the different elements of engaging within social media.
System of Tracking
If we can give one piece of advice about tracking it would be this—while you can easily set of tools to track your results than biggest mistake we see that people make is they fail to put it in a system and schedule.
The first thing before you even install a piece of tracking car or start using a tracking system is to think about how tracking, analyzing trends, and studying reports will fit into your schedule. It’s not just your schedule it could be your team or your organizations schedule.
The first thing to accomplish is to look and see how much time you can spend analyzing the data you’re going to collect. From there another important element of social media marketing is implementing what you learn.
We found the best way to do this is to schedule a weekly or bi-monthly meeting where we discuss metrics. We spend the meeting looking at data in trying to understand what it means for our organization. Finally we and the meaning with key action steps that we can take based on what the data has told us. The next meeting we discuss results of that implementation and repeat the process.
Tools
When we talk about tracking your success in social media you really are talking about metrics and tracking. While there are great tools in the market today we believe that we are at least 1 to 2 years off from tools that really give you insight into how social media marketing plays into your bottom line. Below is a listing of what we find are the most helpful tools in understanding how to track your success in social media marketing:
Swix
SWIX is a social media analytics application that monitors all of your social media properties (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, +20 others). If you’re a social media marketer, or a community manager, SWIX is for you. Whether you do it for yourself, on behalf of your clients, or inside a larger organization, SWIX let’s you split up your properties across multiple campaigns and share the results with your team, clients or bosses.
ObjectiveMarketer
ObjectiveMarketer is a great social media management tool but contains tons of great tracking elements. It connects to GoogleAnlytics and can track your campaigns across multiple channels. It’s a tool we highly recommend and we go back to time and time again.
Radian6
Radian6 gives you a complete platform to listen, measure and engage with your customers across the entire social web.
Onalytica
Onalytica helps businesses grow by providing actionable, intelligent business insight from conversations people are having about their brand right now.
Attensity
Attensity delivers an integrated suite of Customer Experience Management applications to meet the demands of a new breed of empowered consumers. With Attensity Enterprises get a 360 degree of the customer and turn insights into action – optimizing service and creating strong customer loyalty.
