Partner Article

How does social media measure up?

Kelvin Newman, Director of Strategy at digital marketing agency SiteVisibility, discusses the importance of measuring your investment in this growing marketplace.

While the importance of engaging in social media for marketing purposes cannot be under-estimated, it’s crucial to measure just how effective your presence on such sites is to ensure it is really worth the investment.

A good social media strategy begins by taking a step back from the computer screen and establishing not only who your target audience is but also gaining an understanding of how they behave and why they are or should be your customer.

By gaining a better idea of your target audience you’ll also be able to gauge which social media sites are popular amongst them. It’s all very well setting up a Facebook page but is this where your target audience hangs out, or would you be better off investing more of your time maintaining a Twitter or LinkedIn account?

Above all, social media is about engaging with an online audience and not simply bombarding them with a relentless stream of sales messages, which is likely to have a negative impact, with ‘followers’ and ‘friends’ being lost along the way.

The goal in social media engagement is to influence your audience to have a positive impression of your company through factual, verifiable contributions from your staff, who should quite rightly be heralded as experts on their subject matter. In this way you can position yourself as a thought leader within your sector or industry, rather than just talking specifically about your own business.

Effective measurement of social media campaigns is still something that many marketers are only just beginning to appreciate and understand. There are a range of tools available that allow you to monitor and report on growth, total reach and engagement in a huge amount of depth. Understanding and successfully evaluating the array of data available can have massive benefits and the insights can be fed back into your campaign to help improve activity for the future.

So what should you measure?

• Fans/ followers – these are the basics and give you an idea of the growth of your fan base but might not actually be that useful in the long run as for all you know these might not be relevant or ever likely to convert to customers/

• Traffic to your site – this is particularly important for ecommerce sites but, for any business, it’s important to know if your social activity is directing traffic to your site and, more importantly, which links or pieces of content are responsible. Google analytics will provide you with this information.

• Engagement – understanding your engagement rate will show you whether your fans actually care at all about what you have to say or if you are just posting blindly with no results. Keep a track of how many likes, shares, re-tweets or comments you received and note which content was responsible for this.

A fine example of a successful social media campaign is PayPoint, the UK’s leading specialist payments collection network. As a cash payment system, PayPoint knew relatively little about its end users, so the campaign devised by SiteVisibility was designed to establish a fan base for the company and help it gather data on its end users.

This involved creating a new Facebook page, which it launched with a competition offering participants the chance to win £500 towards bills they are able to pay at PayPoint. The campaign lasted two months, from July to August 2012, generated over 10,000 entries and resulted in 13,000 new fans.

Competition entrants had to answer simple questions relating to their use of PayPoint services and how they paid their bills. As well as adding new fans to its Facebook page, the campaign meant that PayPoint gained a valuable insight into its customer demographics and user habits, which it is able to segment according to which service they use. It has also provided PayPoint with a solid, core fan base, which is now highly engaged with the company.

Hopefully, this provides you with a few basic metrics to keep an eye on what should help you understand whether your social media activity is successful or not and also give you an indication of what’s working and what isn’t, allowing you to amend your activity accordingly.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Osprey PR .