After co-hosting WOMMA’s second highest-attended webinar (ever!), we want to explain a fundemental insight.
Blake Bowyer
Media Program Analyst
How do you measure marketing success? There’s one way: eyeballs. Then there’s another way: response. In an era of constant media – social and otherwise – immersion, it’s hard enough to get the first and nearly impossible to gauge the second. But, that’s the business we’re in at EyeTraffic Media and something we think all marketers should provide to their clients. The era of unaccountability has been put out to pasture as clients have begun to demand what they rightfully deserve: ROI.
Thankfully social media bestowed upon marketers throngs of new numbers and mountains of data that enabled them to measure just about anything. Or so it seemed. Social media brought as many challenges as it did boons as far as developing useful metrics. We now have the three F’s of Social Media – Friends, Fans, and Followers – clickthrough, bounce, and conversion rates, and more ratios than we can hardly handle.
The numbers behind social media have spawned jobs, departments, and entire organizations. For true marketers, it’s both beautiful and demanding. The trick is figuring out what metrics are meaningful and which aren’t. Just like every marketing era before the present, the tools of the discipline have been twisted and turned into a sophisticated smoke-and-mirrors show. Some promise to multiply your followers, jumpstart your blog views, and improve an obscure little term called “engagement”. Measuring social media marketing campaigns can get downright silly, even with numbers behind them.
However, with social media, we can monitor consumer activity closer than ever before with click paths, destination, time on site, and ad tolerance; user behavior tracking that was rarely achieved – if ever – with traditional media. With all of this fantastic information, it’s easy to get caught up in just having the data and making hasty adjustments. But we must always remember, no matter how shiny, new, and sophisticated the information we possess gets, a simple piece of Marketing 101: start with objectives.
Not only does each organization have unique objectives, but campaigns may also have varying goals. The problem is, social media came to most of us with such speed and potential that many organizations failed to develop a new strategy. We don’t treat them like traditional media, so why should we use the same strategy? If most organizations stepped back and thought about their original reason for getting on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and the like, my estimation is it would boil down to this:
- Use social media for marketing.
Really? Would you say that with other mediums like broadcast or print? I hope not.
The point is, more sophisticated media demand more sophisticated analysis. When marketers didn’t possess as much information, they had an excuse not to dig through it. But now, they must use it for the sake of their clients, because they’ll demand it at some point.
Now, how do you measure social media? Whoa. You’re skipping a step. First decide what you want to do with social media, then decide how to measure it.
To help get the hang of it, below are some resources for social media monitoring – not measuring – that will give you data to help gauge your social media presence:
So, get an assessment and see how you stack-up. If your organization is completely off the grid, this is a good starting point: objectives. Then you can pick from the litany of metrics to decide how to measure your success on reaching those objectives.
