One of the biggest problems with many social media campaigns is their inability to deliver proven results. Although this is a common problem of many forms of advertising, it is particularly noticeable in social media.
Since social media campaigns frequently involve significant amounts of time and effort ”“ and cost ”“ being able to track results and determine their effectiveness is critical. And yet, until recently, the analytics were insufficient.
Analytics is the collection, measurement and analysis of Internet traffic and data. It is becoming increasingly critical for market research and measuring campaign effectiveness. Several of the commonly used criteria include tracking pages, keywords, amount of time on a page, number of page views and visits per session.
Of the many analytics that we evaluate during a campaign, three of the most important, when relevant, are: the number of people we drive to a website, the amount of time a viewer remains on a website, and the number of conversions from that website, meaning the number of visitors who sign up for a membership, newsletter subscription, software download, or other activity. Unfortunately, while highly useful for certain campaigns, these metrics are not applicable to other campaigns.
This difference highlights one of the major difficulties of social media analytics: being able to determine what exact metrics are required for a social media campaign. The metric for success in one campaign often differs greatly for another campaign. For example, a campaign to improve customer satisfaction differs greatly from brand marketing ”“ an area in which social media is particularly adept.
Nevertheless, analytics are now sufficiently robust that when properly utilized, they can provide at least a fairly accurate assessment of a campaign”™s performance. Interestingly, some of these variables are heavily dependent on social interactions. Included in this category are demographics, strength of referrals and recommendations, inbound links, conversation index, search index, memes (the spread of an idea from an individual to a community), sentiment and engagement.
The chief takeaway from these terms is that the number and sophistication of analytics is rapidly increasing. In fact, many business intelligence companies are struggling with information overload from being able to effectively analyze this plethora of data.
The Internet is still the great equalizer. A company of two people can have a bigger online presence than a company of 5,000 employees. To an extent, the same holds true for the value of analytics, the main difference being the size and duration of a social media marketing campaign. There are some metrics for specific pages that are basic to all campaigns, such as the click-through rate for some call to action or the bounce rate on a landing page or home page.
Every company or marketer must determine which metrics to use based on their business objectives. Incorporating this into working goals and hypotheses greatly facilitates the use of the appropriate combination of metrics. This is the crucial element of every social media campaign: setting realistic goals that are measurable and relevant. Furthermore, these measurements and goals must be determined prior to the execution of the campaign.
Fortunately, there are a growing number of companies and products that provide a range of analytics most businesses can use. The data they provide will now allow almost every business to develop effective social media campaigns and quickly determine their effectiveness.
With products ranging in price from Google Analytics, which is free (and should be included on every website), to high-end services costing thousands of dollars per month, the data they provide will now allow almost every business to develop effective social media campaigns and quickly determine their effectiveness.
Bruce Newman is the president of wwWebevents.com, a division of The Productivity Institute L.L.C. in Carmel. He is a social media guru and a specialist on webinar creation and promotion. He can be reached at bnewman@prodinst.com.
