Strategies for Social Media Platforms, Organizing Your Team And
What to Measure
He stresses that brands should be wary of anybody who tries to
tell them that they can put an absolute value on a Facebook fan,
Twitter follower or their latest Pinterest pinner. "For anyone to
suggest that the value of a Coca-Cola fan on
Facebook or Twitter is equal to the value of a BMW fan on Facebook
or Twitter, it's ludicrous. So the media-equivalency equations
unfortunately really lead people astray. They do help sell a lot of
services, but they don't actually really give you a true measure of
the value of an activity on social media," Mr. Brito said.
Adds Constant Contact's Social-Media Manager Erica Ayotte:
"What's really hard is determining the value of followership."
Instead, Ms. Ayotte believes brands have to ask very different
questions of their social-media campaigns. "What gets me really
excited is looking at it from a different intelligence perspective,
from taking all that data and being able to ask the right
questions, " she said. "For example, do people who are engaging
with us on Facebook ... do they buy more, stay longer? That's the
type of business intelligence ... I think the whole industry is
moving [toward]." Other aspects to consider tracking are trust,
purchase-decisions influence, seeking new products and getting
recommendations.
ROI is really just one way to figure out how much your brand
benefits from having a social life. With a little creativity -- and
with an understanding that you need to push your measurement in new
directions -- you can more clearly understand what social media
delivers to your brand. Steven L. Johnson, assistant professor and
director of social-media programs at Temple University's Fox School
of Business, offered the example of the Campbell's Kitchen Facebook
page, whose "mission is to get people to use more Campbell's Soup
products." Mr. Johnson said Campbell figured out that every time
somebody printed a recipe from Facebook, they prepared it
approximately 2.5 times, and 1.7 times, they used a Campbell's Soup
product. "You can't figure that out online," he said. "They just
figured that out through some kind of additional market research.
But then based on that , you're able to put a value on this action
that you're trying to drive people toward."
While larger marketers end up building enterprise-class tracking
tools, many companies rely on a cobbled together set of tools. Some
of the top names in the measuring game include Radian6; Webtrends analytics to
measure Facebook and mobile; and Twitalyze to measure, as you probably guessed,
Twitter activity; Google Analytics, which is a very sophisticated product
(especially for the price of ... free); and Simply Measured, which
also looks at competitors' engagement to provide benchmarking.
"Measuring social is easy: likes, comments, views, shares,
engagement, participation, etc. The numbers are all there and are
easy to pull. Determining success is still the difficult part,"
said Daniel Stein, founder-CEO, Evolution Bureau.
"The jury is still out on the value of fan interaction. Most people
agree that having a loyal, engaged fan base is a good thing -- how
good or how valuable compared to other forms of more
institutionalized marketing is still debatable."