Four Practical Ways to Measure Social Media
Not long ago I sat in on a webinar on social media measurement. I should say I sat in on some of it, because I left after 24 minutes. That’s about 23 minutes longer than I should have spent there.
There’s two types of conversations we can have about social media, and measurement in particular: strategic and tactical.
They need to happen in that order and you need to understand the difference. This post is a tactical one.
If you don’t already understand the need for a clear strategic understanding of your business, your online presence, customers and competitors both online and off, and what your businesses’ primary goals are across all units and departments, go take the time to figure that out. (Reading Groundswell might be a good start ).
Tactically speaking, how do you start measuring social media? Is there enough social stuff out there to make it worthwhile? What numbers do I show to our CMO and CFO to get any time or budget at all to be able to monitor, participate and grow a social media presence?
Here are some examples of ways to see right now, in any business, what impact social media might be having on your organization.
1. Traffic from Referring Sites
This might seem like a no-brainer, but see if you’re getting traffic (and links) from social networks, blogs, forums and other communities. See which sites are sending traffic (sometimes a proxy for buzz) and which are sending more engaged visitors than the site average or more conventional traffic sources (time on site and pages per view)
2. Conversions from Referring Sites
Again from the Referring Sites report, you should have conversions tracked through goals, events or e-commerce. See which sites are sending quality traffic. You can see #1, 2, 3 and 4 are all sending solid traffic which is doing a pretty good job of converting. (The #1 source is their own blog, which is just rocking out!)
3. Create a Custom Segment for Social Media
This will make your life much easier. Find the top 10 or so social media sites sending you good traffic, or which you’re targeting to participate in, and create a segment for them. Follow them, and you can start by using the conventional traffic metrics if you’re not measuring other social media metrics.
4. Check Google Blog Search
Just stick your head in once a month and see how many results show up. Try your branded terms, product names and the names of high profile individuals at your organization.
It’s not rocket science, just making better use of the data you already have.
Hey Chris,
All good methods. You also want to be able to measure your engagement and network. Have you tried Klout? Would love your opinion.
-Megan
@meganberry
Hi Megan, I’ve played around with Klout for social media audits before. With this post I was aiming at the surprisingly large number of organizations with no presence at all but who are still being discussed in the social sphere. Klout and Twitter Grader are both great tools, although I sometimes worry about Twitter playing to large a role in many people’s strategy because it looks easy to do, and there’s lots of fun looking tools (which are relatively easy to build). Thanks for the comment!
Chris, I like your approach in terms of making it simple and accessible for most anyone – at least those who can afford Google Analytics
– to get a handle on the impact of social networking. Sure, there are a growing number of sophisticated tools, and they should be implemented as appropriate, but this is a great way to get started.
First step is often the hardest, and you’ve paved the trail.
I agree, that focusing on Google Analytics is a cool start as it is free. And it is best for all things, that lead to your website. But if you want to keep track of things like your twitter followers, fans or friends on facebook or clicks on bit.ly you might want to try TwentyFeet.
We are creating a social media metrics application at http://www.twentyfeet.com that will centralize all your web stats in one place. We only have twitter, facebook and bit.ly so far. But I would love to get feedback from you guys about it, as soon as it gets live in the next weeks.
Hi Martin, thanks for the comment. I’ll check it out, maybe drop me a line when you launch.