Quantifying the qualitative: Delving into the world of social media metrics

Social media content developers and strategists are often tasked with the seemingly ambiguous task of increasing brand awareness. While ambiguous, this task is not impossible, and many large firms rely on in-house metrics tracking to determine their success. Smaller businesses typically turn to social media companies to manage their strategy and analytics. When determining which metrics are worth tracking, it’s imperative to have a clear business goal or objective. Call it the observer effect – you don’t know what you’re going to get until you measure it.

Hello, is it me you’re looking for?

Thanks Lionel Ritchie, you’ve made this transition all that much smoother. There are five main areas that are conducive to measurement and tracking:

1. Sentiment ratio –  positive, negative, neutral?
2. Engagement levels – how many retweets, likes, shares (how are people interacting with your content)?
3. Referral traffic – how much traffic is coming to your sites?
4. Reach – how far is the content and/or mentions going?
5. Community size – what is the rate of increase of followers and likes?

Social media analytics are changing rapidly. Marketers have various tools at their disposal such as Sprout Social, Google Analytics, Hootsuite and IBM Watson Analytics for Social Media, which provide a snapshot of customer and brand perception and brand awareness.

I had the pleasure of speaking to Kenneth Hillman, a marketing professional who held various roles in social media content development and strategy within the Austin Texas area. When asked to describe how marketers use metrics to gauge the impact of a campaign, he responded with:

“When impact is properly measured marketers are better able to redirect efforts to improve engagement rates across all platforms. Metrics used to measure impact include setting benchmarks for clients based on data, using paid ad platform metrics, track clicks, engagement, video views, correlations and trends, tools for listening, tools to track correlations etc. Some of these are custom built, some social platforms have their own proprietary tools and other third-party tools are used as well.”

Example: Clearon Bleach Tablets

Clearon Bleach’s objective was to reach a younger demographic in a rapid time frame. They used social media as the chosen avenue to get their message out and engage potential customers. This also met their requirement for being a low-cost advertising solution.

Clearon Bleach employed the services of LYFE Marketing to develop a strategy to reach hundreds of thousands of people throughout a 3-month time frame. The plan included various social media strategies including but not limited to content development, consumer engagement, audience expansion and contests.

The success of the campaign was measured with a 430% follower increase, 1,000,000 impressions, 6 contests and a 112% increase in revenue.

Lessons for Others

Using the right metrics to measure the success of a social media campaign is a cost-effective way to determine where marketing resources should be dedicated. The benefit of using social media metrics is that it can help digital marketers understand the performance of their content and change course should there be lack of engagement. This helps optimize content across all channels and gives a clear picture of how engagement translates to revenue. Data analysis can provide even more insight by offering the full story of the ROI of the online marketing campaign.

If you have concerns as to the accuracy of anything posted on this site, please send your concerns to Peter Carr, Program Director, Social Media for Business Performance.

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