Here at Ionic Media, we are huge proponents of metrics-based marketing: measuring every dollar spent and analyzing for maximum effectiveness, whether leads, conversions, revenue, profits, margin, contribution, ROI/ROAS, or whatever other metrics you use. Analysis is the backbone of what any modern agency should do.
But social media presents quite the challenge for a numbers-oriented marketer. There are historic best-practices to measure offline conversions (especially in an increasingly online world), but there currently are few agreed metrics to measure what’s effective in a social media campaign.
Here are some ways that we think of measuring social media:
Rule 1: Seek the bottom line. Whenever possible, all metrics should be aligned with greatest bottom-line impact. Ideally revenues produced, sales delivered, or leads sourced through social media channels. There is simply no substitute for being able to measure against hard bottom-line goals.
Rule 2: Quantify the conversation. Social media is all about engaging customers and prospects in an ongoing conversation. At a minimum, you must be able to quantify the conversation points: page views, clicks, comments, etc. are all ways of measuring engagement. Make assumptions and try to quantify the value of each conversation.
Rule 3: Follow the friends and fans. Social media allows the general public to vote for your business/product/service through aligning themselves with you. Compared to traditional Google Page-Rank, this is an even stronger method of them passing authority to your business. They aren’t simply linking to you, they are actually seeking out a long-term relationship with you. That’s relationship is gold, and should be measured.
Rule 4: Treat social ROI as any other marketing ROI. In other words, quantify the value of a “friend” or “fan”, of a click-through or forum comment, in the same way you would quantify the value of a direct sale. Where possible measure direct sales/leads. A popular way to do this is by inserting tracking code and registration forms on landing pages and other important sections of your website to correlate between social media users IDs, email addresses and IP address. Where impossible, then value registration forms, newsletter sign ups or Facebook fans/Twitter followers. You may feel like you are guessing at the value, and you are at first, but those initial valuation assumptions should still be tracked (and charted on a weekly basis at a minimum). Assumptions can be refined over time, and that wild guesstimate of $5 value per Facebook fan can quickly be quantified over time (how many leads or sales had Facebook as a referrer? That’s one obvious way to quantify value).
So, just as with any hard marketing budgets, you would expect to measure results and be able to see performance changes as they occur – you need to adopt the same mindset for social media. Very few businesses engage in social media solely as a way to manage reputation or handle customer service issues. Most of us use it as a logical extension of our brand, and as a low-cost way to reach prospects directly. However, even in the wild west of social media, metricology must occur: are my numbers moving in the right direction, am I seeing the engagement I expected, can I quantify or measure the efficiency of these channels?
In this way social media metricology can result in just as refined a marketing understanding as whether Google’s ROI is higher than Bing’s, or whether display banner networks perform for your business.
Ted Huffman
Managing Director
Ionic Media
