Social Media Measurement: What Should I Measure in Social Media?
A new survey from MarketingSherpa revealed that marketers are still measuring just the basic aspects of their social media campaigns with stats easily obtained from free sources. The chart shows responses to the question: “What metrics do you use to monitor and measure the impact of social media?”
MarketingSherpa reports that:
“Organizations use a wide variety of tools, and use multiple tools in tandem, to monitor the dialogue related to their company, brand and competitors across blogs and other social media sites. Not surprisingly, free tools such as Google Search, Google Alerts, Twitter Search and Yahoo! Search, top the list and are used much more broadly than fee-based tools.”
To really dive down into the details marketers are going to have to pay for advanced social media measurement services like Alterian SM2 or Radian6. For now, with this still an emerging medium, most people are getting by with the free tools. As the space matures and ROI becomes more defined, I suspect you’ll see those bottom areas increase in response.
The complete report and details on the survey can be found at www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=31548
Mike Santoro is President of Walker Sands Communications. He works to define integrated marketing and media communications strategy and oversees the tactical execution of marketing campaigns, communications pieces, web development, and PR outreach for the firm's top clients.
A few others metrics to consider:
1. Bounce Rate – are social media users less or more sticky when they visit
2. Loyalty – how often do social media visitors return
3. Mentions – Mentions of your brand in social media
4. Conversations – Blog comments, Direct Messages, Retweets, etc.
5. Back Links – # of links attributable to Social Media. (Helps with SEO)
6. Intelligence – Amount of actionable information supplied by the network. (Feature requests, problems with service, etc.)
7. Support Requests – number of support queries handled through social media
John,
I think those are great additions to the list. They are still largely pretty basic and ones that marketers can easily measure with free tools and a smart agency/marketing team.
We’re going to see this space evolve rapidly so that marketers begin caring about the details of these high level metrics. Things like the sentiment of the mention and the amount of influence/reach that a particular person has will become everyday metrics.
It will be a very interesting space to watch, but for now I’m glad to see the marketing community measuring something. Think about where marketers were even 1-2 years ago. What was cutting edge then is now standard practice.
Mike