Social networking should now play part in any marketing strategy. However, the thing that most companies struggle with is measuring the effectiveness of a social media marketing campaign. PPC campaigns and even standard search marketing provide very obvious and simple ways of measuring return on investment, yet with social networking it is not as straightforward. As the nature of social networking is more concerned with conversation and communication, it is not just a case of measuring sales revenue. Here we look at a few simple ways to measure the effectiveness of your social media plan.
Before you can measure anything you need to have goals in place to start with. Some basic objectives that are commonly created for social media are increase in traffic to your website, brand perception and ultimately sales if that is the nature of your business. By just having a few objectives for your social media strategy you can measure things easier and by ensuring that any goals are realistic you are not setting yourself up for a fall.
In terms of measuring traffic it is quite easy to monitor where visitors to your site come from. By including links to specific pages within your website on your social networking profile, you can monitor the percentage of traffic which links to your site via social networking sites. You will also need to monitor traffic going from any social networking page as other users could distribute your links via their pages too.
When it comes to measuring brand perception and awareness this is more of a grey area, but it is not as difficult as it first seems. Monitoring the tweets and status updates is where it begins and there are several stages to assessing the content of them. Firstly identify how often specific brands are being discussed or mentioned and compare pre and post measurements. By generating discussions you can quite easily increase the awareness and communication around a specific brand or element of a brand.
Having a brand talked about it not enough, delve a little deeper and look at the quality of the comments. Some will be obvious positive or negative comments whilst others may be harder to segment. It is important that any negative comments are identified even if they are not so obvious at the beginning, as any negative comments which get out of control can be extremely damaging to a business.
Sales revenue is not an obvious objective for social media yet it can work. This works better by promoting a specific product rather than a company as a whole and by tailoring your social media marketing strategy around one product you can measure any sales increase more easily. There are several ways to promote a product via social networking sites. You can take either a direct approach and simply ask people to try a product and provide a web link, or you can spark a discussion surrounding it to generate conversation. Either way is effective and can result in a dramatic sale increase if handled correctly.
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Posted by Steve.
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It is a form of internet marketing which seeks to achieve branding and marketing communication goals through the participation in various social media networks.
Excellent post, i think blog posts like this add so much value to the marketing community,i have learnt some valuable info from you. Keep it Up! Sincerely, The Social Media Trainer