etmc-5-steps-to-effective-social-media-measurement.pdf

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Social Media | Measuring Your Efforts 03

Step One| Align Your Objectives 04

Step Two | Measure Reach and Share of Conversation 05

Step Three | Measure Conversions and Sales 08

Step Four | Track and Measure Your Leads 12

Step Five | Measure Your Cost Savings 13

Conclusion 16

Helpful Equations 17

Five Steps to Effective Social Media exacttarget.com

Table of Contents


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Social Media: Measuring Your EffortsIf youre going to invest time in social media, you need to measure performance, but it can be difcultto identify relevant metrics. Theres no one-size-ts-all method of measuring social media successbecause goals vary from brand to brand. But you can certainly nd ways to measure all the work youreputting into your social presence.

Create strong measurementobjectives from the start.

Save money training employeesby using social media tools.

Determine which social media

channels are best suited toboost your bottom line.

Weave social media into your

customer service approach in atrackable way.

Put a dollar value on socialmedia metrics such asFacebook likes.

Focus on the metrics thatindicate a shift in the way youraudience is viewing or interactingwith your brand.

Get started now with the practical applications explained in this guide. Well help you:

Five Steps to Effective Social Mediaexacttarget.com


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Align Your ObjectivesYour social strategy should always lead with measurable objectives. Vague, imprecise objectives like get more Twitter followers arent easily measured and can leave you

frustrated. Instead, your objectives should follow the SMART methodology, rst introduced by Peter

Drucker in his 1954 book The Practice of Management . The acronym stands for a Specic, Measurable,

Actionable, Realistic, and Timed denition of your goals:

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Specic: Establish objectives that are specic to your desired results. For example, if your objective is toincrease brand awareness, try a more focused approach like, Increase brand awareness by 10% in thenext six months through a targeted social media campaign.

Measurable: Use consistent metrics in your review process to verify the effectiveness of your efforts.Outlining your specic objectives helps you assess your results and decide how to move forward inthe future.

Achievable: Often, a goal of 90% customer satisfaction is more attainable than a goal of 100% customersatisfaction. The same is true for your social media plan, so consider whats feasible when settingyour objectives.

Relevant: Your goals should always suppor t your companys big-picture plans. Goals that are worthwhile,align with other internal goals, and champion your team will always receive better support.

Timed: Incorporate a time frame into your objectives to make yourself accountable for their fruition. Utilizetools like content calendars, review and edit timelines, and analytic checklists to make your objectivesmore real and tangible.



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Measure Reach and Share of Conversation Social media makes it easy for your customers and prospects to share information about your productsor services online.

It also enables you to inuence buying decisions through direct relationships with customers. But how

do you measure the effectiveness of these conversations and relationships? Calculating reach and share

of conversation helps you gauge your social value and make any needed adjustments. Several different

metrics aid in this process, but remember, only focus on the ones that help you move toward your goals.

2 Monitor your social media networks for raw numbers.

Check your website and blog for daily or monthly peak times and estimate what percentage ofyour followers you can reach with a single post, a weeks worth, a months worth, etc.

Look at the resonance of a single post by watching retweets and shares.

Measure secondary reach, or the friends of your friends who might see your posts.

Social Media Reach

Your social media reach looks at the potential number of people your campaign touches. Itsimportant to note that this is an approximate calculation and not an actual number. Unfortunately,not every Twitter follower, blog subscriber, or Facebook connection reads or even sees the contentyou publish. Here are some ways to check your potential reach:



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Looking at your average monthly reach across all your social properties

Counting the number of transactions/conversions that originate in those channels duringthat same month

Establishing the ratio: For every 10 potential people, we can count two conversions, orve new blog subscribers, or three email sign ups, etc.

Remember, the goal isnt simply to gain the follower, but to move them to action. Validating this action convers ion requires:

Share of Conversation

Check your share of conversation to understand how much buzz is surrounding your brand. As

youre mentioned in relevant conversations, you become more visible and it becomes easier

for your audience to substantiate you over a competitor in the same market.

Calculate share of conversation like this:

1. Determine your topic, subject, or market of focus. For example, if you work for a diabetesfoundation, you might want to look at conversations around diabetes research ordiabetes support.

2. Within that topic, track and count the posts you want to measure during a specic timeperiod. Thirty days is generally a good time frame.

3. Also track posts that mention both the topic and your brand during that same time frame.

4. Divide these metrics to get a resulting percentage: your share of conversation.

Youll also want to take a look at inbound links, social bookmarks, and customer

recommendations when gauging online conversation about your brand, as we explain next.

Social Media Reach

People who shared content

Their networks


Number of posts mentioning chosentopic and your brand

Number of posts mentioningchosen topic



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Strength of Referrals and Recommendations

Checking online recommendations and referrals helps you assess the impact of word of mouth on your brand.To check your brands referral strength: Monitor mentions of your brand name and any variations and common misspellings.

Look for direct recommendations or referrals. For example, a response to a request for information.

Look for implied recommendations. For example, Bobs Towing is great and Id use them anytime!

Monitor the percentage of posts that are direct or implied recommendations over a period of time. Again, 30days is a good benchmark.

For a deeper look, map names and proles that are recipients of the direct recommendations. Overlay these recipients with your prospect/contact database and see how many have actually entered

your pipeline.

Getting Attention: Social Bookmarks

Social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon or Reddit are great tools for put ting your content out there. Socialbookmarking makes it easier for pe ople to view, share, and comment on your content. The goal is to get yourcontent in front of real people, not bots, who are interested in what you have to say and can share it with otherpeople, thus boosting your SEO. Try setting up a search on these sites for your company or blog name to seehits for bookmarks. How many people have bookmarked your particular link? Look at your referral analytics tosee where these sites sit on the refering site list and correlate your trafc volume per month with the number ofbookmarks in the same time period.

Building Awareness: Inbound Links

Think of inbound links as your online currency, contributing to things like your search visibility in Google. Yourinbound link results should correlate with your digital content goals. For example, If you are trying to build buzzaround a new widget, explore some content marketing options that you can share on social media: write a fewblog posts about how to use it, its top features, and highlighting the best customer reviews of the widget. Includegreat visuals and buttons for easy social sharing, and youve built yourself a rm foundation for inbound linking.Be sure to look at your analytic web tools to see if any of your prospects website or social media accountsare are top referring sites to your website. Dont forget that the quality of your content is key to engaging yourcustomers and driving those inbound links.

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Measure Conversions and Sales If youre new to the world of social media strategy, you may think that measuring social is all aboutthe number of eyeballs that see your content.

But the actions that your social visitors take are much more important to your success than total eyeballs.

This next-step interaction from your audience is known as a conversion. Conversion measurement always

depends on your organizations goals, whether its clicking a link, lling out a form, or making purchaseson your website.

Attribution

Attribution describes what you should consider when measuring a sale. Your social e ffort s oftenassist in a sale or conversion, yet these assists are generally underrated when looking at bottomline results. There are three main kinds of attribution you can use to measure a sale: rst action,last action, and linear action.

First-action attribution gives 100% credit to the rst interaction your customer had with you, orthe activity that rst made the prospect aware of your company.

Last-action attribution gives the last thing a prospect encountered 100% credit for drivinga lead.

Linear action gives credit equally to all stages of the process.

As a company, you need to decide which model makes more sense for you and where your socia lmedia efforts t into the puzzle. If this metric sounds interesting, you may want to do some fur therreading on measuring the success of social media.

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CorrelationCorrelation tracks your overall sales and website referrals andthen compares them to your online activity. If your followers, blogsubscribers, and social shares have all increased along with sales,you can indicate a positive correlation bet ween social media initiatives

and sales. If social media activity goes up but sales stay at or godown, something isnt working in your conversion model.

Your correlation can also be measured in ratios. For example, youmight make a $50,000 investment in social media (time, money, orboth) that correlates with a $250,000 increase in sales over the sametime period. You have now determined the proportion in sales or leadtrafc increase over the time period in which you track your socialmedia activities, and are able to extract a relationship betweenthe two.

Note

Correlation isnt an exact measurement, but rather, indicates general trends and possibly related events that you may want toresearch further.



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Value of a Facebook LikeTracking the value of your Facebook likes in monetary terms means looking at the revenuegenerated via leads and trafc originating from your Facebook efforts. If your Facebook pagedoesnt drive leads or sales and is more of a brand awareness tool, it may be too difcult todetermine the value of each Facebook like and this metric may not be for you.

Checking your number of likes is easy, but how do you determine the total revenuein 30 days from Facebook trafc? Here are a few ideas:

Build landing pages within your website that are only accessible via Facebook.

Use your analytics software to track referral trafc from Facebook.

Look at the percentage of conversions to leads from Facebook trafc (i.e., they lled out yourcontact form or emailed you for more information), then track which ones become customersthrough your sales/CRM database. Or, if you have e-commerce on your site, track thecompleted transactions that originate from Facebook.

Note that this method doesnt take into account outside factors such as pastcorrespondence or ofine inuence. For a more holistic view, consider cross-referencingyour Facebook likes with your sales database for the bigger picture.

Total revenue in 30 days from FacebookTotal number of likes

Value of a Facebook Like



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Conversion Rates

The real value of social conversion comes when you take a collective view of all of your socialmedia initiatives. Anything you qualify as a succes sful interaction according to your goals should be

considered a conversion. An email newsletter sign-up, a blog subscription, a contact form submission,a content download, a contest entry, or, of course, a purchase could all be considered conversions.

Another way to look at th is metric is to identify lead to sale conversions that are a fliated with, bu tdont necessarily originate with, your social properties.

When a lead comes in through any channel, cross-reference it with your email subscribers, Twitterfollowers, or Facebook likes and indicate the associations in your database.

Look at the conversion percentage of those who have social network associations versus those

that dont.

Look to see if leads associated with your social networks convert to sales more quickly or moreslowly than others. Track this from the time the lead is opened in your database to the date ofthe sale.

Increasing Direct-Response Sales

The purpose of direct-response sales is to provide a unique way for people to buy from you thatsexclusive to your social media channels. The key here is to create a VIP-type environment thatencourages people to interact and share with their network. You can try:

A promotional code you distribute only inside your online community

A specic and unique landing page you create only for your Twitter followers

A coupon available only to your Facebook network

Track the sales that are generated through these initiatives. These direct-response campaigns are onearea where you can calculate true ROI by meticulously tracking the time, resources, and expensesyou put into a specic social media effort and the direct sales that come from that effor t.



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Measure Your Cost SavingsSometimes, the value of your business endeavor isnt about what goesup (like revenue) but what comes down (such as costs). Social mediacan have some very clear efficiencies, most notably in customer service,but also in areas like training or communications.

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Cost Per Issue ResolutionHow much does it cost to solve customer issues, and can social media bring that cost down?In many cases, yes. Determining cost requires you to determine the expense of resources(like hardware or software) as well as salary and benets. If youre tracking cost per resolutionthrough channels like phone or email and web support, you can also track it through socialmedia. If you have the resources and an established social presence, you can star t by allocatingresources to handle some issues only through social media channels, while others c ontinue tomanage traditional channels.

Average Resolution TimeHow much time does it take for your company to resolve an issue from the moment it is

captured to the time its closed and archived? Most CRMs can generate these reports for you,but youll need to have tracking in place to evaluate this properly. You should look at severaldifferent scenarios that play into your issue resolution time:

Issues that originate in social media channels, like a Twitter complaint or a blog comment.

Issues that are resolved in social media channels and how long they take from the initialpost to delivery of an answer or resolution.

Hybrid issues, such as those that start on the forum, but require carryover resolutionthrough phone or email.

Compare traditional resolution time (email/telephone support), resolution time that begins onsocial media and ends through telephone or email, and issues handled exclusively throughsocial media. Once you compile all the data, nd your average time spent resolving issues andlook at your efciency on social media.

Total work hours resolving issuesNumber of issues resolved

Average Resolution Time

Daily support costs Average number of issues handled

Cost Per Issue Resolution



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Training, Idea Generation, and Employee EducationTheres no doubt that you have hidden costs associated with trainingemployees. Social media capabilities and tools can help enhance yourefciency and save bottom line cash. Consider the following ideas:

Create a YouTube or Vimeo video library of employee-generated tutorials, tips, and ideas based on your commontraining needs.

Use an internal social network or communication platform,such as Chatter , for employees to share their best practicesand knowledge on an ongoing basis.

Create and share webinars, Twitter chats, and SlideSharepresentations about need-to-know information.

Survey your employees to see if theyre taking advantage ofsocial tools and how theyre impacting job per formance.

CPM and Cost Per Dollar Raised

Has fear of the unknown deterred you from running social campaigns,higher-price display ads, or promotions on social media? Determinethe cost of that potential reach. Using CPM (cost per thousand),you can compare the total campaign cost against the total potentialreach, and then calculate how much it would cost you to reach everythousand people. Track the approximate potential reach of a particularsocial campaign,

the time and effort put into managing that online presence, and anyhard dollars spent for items such as landing pages or ads. Take alook at your total potential reach and break down either the CPM orthe cost per dollar raised. These calculations can help you determinewhether or not a particular social campaign will be worthwhile.

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ConclusionDeveloping an effective measurement strategy requires relevant data and

the exibility to tweak your tactics. There is no universal way to measureevery social media initiative, but these calculations are at your disposal.

Choose wisely and dont overwhelm yourself. Its up to you to choose what

to track. Remember that measurement is time-consuming work, but its

impossible to be serious about tracking and bypass the work involved.

Measurement is a discipline, and it takes a consistent investment of time

and effort.

For tools that get results

and start conversationsthat convert, discoverExact arget MarketingClouds next generationsocial marketing solutions atexacttarget.com

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Helpful Equations

Social Media Reach

People who shared contentTheir networks


Number of posts mentioning chosentopic and your brand

Number of posts mentioningchosen topic

Total revenue in 30 days from FacebookTotal number of likes

Value of a Facebook Like

Total work hours resolving issuesNumber of issues resolved

Average Resolution Time

Daily support costs Average number of issues handled

Cost Per Issue Resolution



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