source: newmediachatter.com
In the many conversations that I’ve had with current and prospective clients regarding social media, two of the benefits that I consistently mention are:
- The realtime client/customer feedback that can be generated
- The high degree of measurability that can be present if the social media efforts are planned with specific metrics in mind
A recent blog post by Chris Brogan contains some great insights into how effective social media metrics can be tracked. His process begins with a series of questions, including:
- How can we fill your sales funnel?
- How can we improve engagement?
- How can we improve exposure and coverage?
- How are we empowering your community to interact?
- How do we grow sales from your community?
- How can we build a voice and a new stage for your ideas?
- How do we bridge your offline experiences with your online presence?
- How are we extending to the mobile environment?
From this point, their process moves through various steps until it reaches a point of defining the metrics for the project. A representative list of metrics includes:
- Percent of online conversation (versus competitors)
- Percent of coverage improvement
- Number of new subscribers/attendees/buyers via tracking links
- Number of new threads, comments, conversations for engagements
- Number of actions taken (for instance, on email newsletters)
- Change (hopefully an increase) in dollar per visitor on a monthly average
- Number of leads generated
- Number of sales call conversions directly linked to leads generated by social media
- Number of unique visitors and other basic web metrics
You can read the full blog post for more details, but the encouraging thing from my standpoint is that industry leaders such as Brogan continue to encourage marketing professionals to track the success of their social media efforts on an ongoing basis. The ability to share successes and shortcomings with clients and make adjustments along the way can only lead to better outcomes and more satisfying relationships.
