Measuring Social Media Marketing

Social media is a conversation powered by various Web 2.0 platforms. It is a conversation that takes place between Customers, Marketers, Employees, and Investors and web surfers. Social Media as a conversation is not organized, controlled or in a form of an advertisement. It is dynamic, vibrant, emergent, compelling, insightful and of course full of fun! One needs to engage in the conversation by being listening, contributing, and participation. Hence, Social Media Marketing (SMM) is not just a medium of communication but a place for marketers to understand its target audience.

There are majorly six steps to measuring social media marketing for any brand, personality or individuals and that is:

1)Setting the objectives: The SMM goals will be different for every business or organization, SMM can - create brand awareness or build idea, increase visibility, leverage existing social media sites to the company’s advantage, help in Creating a multi-pronged marketing strategy
attract & Motivate through Potential Customer Experience etc.

Make is measurable, set appropriate deadlines, set the kind of changes in attitude and behavior that is expected, output & outcomes. One thing that many digital marketers face difficulty is in measurement and the first step to measure is to set RIGHT objectives. The objectives should be in the interest of the organisation and community.

2) Determining metrics of measurements

Relationships: Quality, mutual trust, conversation index, power of influence, etc
Analytics Outcomes: Benefits, costs and risks.

3) Defining Stakeholders

4) Benchmarking against competition

5) Selection of measurement tool : Various free and paid tools are readily available in the market such as Omniture, Google Analytics, Radian 6, SEER, Jeremiah’ list, Buzz Logic, The CGM Dashboard, Alexa, Del.icio.us, Veoh, Feedburner, Quantcast, Yahoo pipes etc. They measure the following statistics but the list is endless:
>Number of unique users, participation & engagement, returning v/s new readers, referring traffic, Google page rank, links from other sites, page views etc

6) Analysis and Re-strategize
Using the tools a SM marketer can analyse the position of the campaigns and then decide if it’s worth the money. The ROI calculation becomes very important in this case nevertheless, social media definitely has long term returns. ROI can be calculated keeping account of expenses such as Cost of campaigns+ media expenses + no. of responses

This entry is posted by - Isha Shah (S.P.Jain Global MBA - Marketing alumni and an avid Social Media Marketer). She can be reached through mail at: ishashah86@gmail.com