How to measure social media: A practical approach
November 12, 2009 – 12:31 am by Matt KellyBenchmarking is the only way to measure the efficacy of a social media campaign. Don’t think social media is an entirely different animal just because you aren’t familiar with it. Because of the ad hoc nature of social, there is no universal way to approach it, but here’s what I’ve done for social campaigns:
1) Research the situation, organization and publics as you would normally. This will prescribe whether social media is the best approach. For example, if you’re trying to reach a demographic that reads newspapers more than news Web sites, reconsider social media as a key strategy. Save it for tactics. If the target publics and stakeholders align with the focus of the program, campaign or project, go to the next step.
2) Strategy. Establish goals and objectives for the campaign. If you want to increase social media impressions 50 percent by 1st quarter 2010, for example, you need to establish where the program is currently. For existing programs, it’s easy to use an online measurement tool like Compete to gather approximate unique visitor figures for any given Web site mentioning your program. The free version of the service gives you figures back one year. If a current search for the site does not exist, you’ll have to create one. It takes a month to aggregate new data. If this is the case, begin anyway. Relationship building cannot start soon enough. As for finding mentions of your program, set up a search term (“Matt’s widget emporium” NOT “toys” NOT “stuff”) on high-traffic platforms (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr) and click search. Refine the search term to make it more efficient if it’s not pulling the mentions you want. Click the RSS feed button on the page and it will give you the code for an RSS aggregator (I recommend Google Reader). Or, you can copy the URL in the search bar and paste into the Google Reader subscription. You can also set up an RSS feed using Google Alerts. This is another free service from Google that allows you to pull mentions from blogs, news and other Web sites.
If you want to make ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN your efforts garnered the coverage, use a unique URL service, such as HootSuite, tr.im, budurl, bit.ly, etc. This allows you to enter any URL (like the one for your news release), shorten it into a unique URL and track how many people click it. It also serves as proof that you earned impressions — not the vendor — at evaluation time.
3) Choose your tactics and implement the plan. This often relies heavily on blogger relations – not simply e-mail, but several channels. The best relations often come from a pull model—allowing the influencer to use content that fits his or her theme. Give the blogger/social media thought leader a place to pull information and rich media from. This comes in the form of a social media release , or SMR, (not just a news release with hyperlinks). Measurement tip: House it on your Web site if you can. This makes it easy for your IT people to run analytics (5 Ws and H of your microsite’s traffic). Or, if you lack resources, make your own site to house the SMR. You can run your own analytics with Google Analytics for free. Search Mashable to find all the tools you need.
4) Evaluate the efficacy of your plan. Keep in mind, social media is fickle. If it revolves around human interaction, it’s impossible to determine causation. We aren’t saying a commercial caused customers to convert in rafts; those old advertising and marketing tactics are over.
However, keep this in mind when measuring: Don’t think in terms of activity and results. Think of outputs and outcomes. You can quantify how many e-mails you send social influencers, how many impressions you get from your unique URLs, and all the other outputs it takes to sustain meaningful relationships among various social media. Take screen caps. Count unique visitors. Put it in Excel.
Keep communicating, even when the program is over. You’re creating more than a transactional relationship.
