With the evolutionary growth of social media being used as a
marketing, communication, and promotional tool, it is vital that companies
understand how to measure and quantify their social media influence through web
analytics. Some of the traditional metrics that have been viewed as important
(followers, fans, total tweets, following to follower ratio, etc.) are
suboptimal in accurately measuring a company’s social media success. However,
there are some specific metrics provided through web analytics that can assist
companies in understanding and quantifying their social media presence from a
more business-centric standpoint.
Conversion Rate
The first important metric is the conversion rate. This metric
can be two-fold in its meaning. First of all, it can refer simply to converting
“likes”, ”fans”, and “followers” into actual interactions with your content. This
can take the form of comments, replies, shares, or reposts.
Secondly, web analytics can be used to analyze conversion
rates from your social network audience into actual paying customers. Companies
can see that x amount of customers came to the website through different social
media platforms, and then quantify results based on the profit seen from each
of the various sites. By discovering the profits attributed to social media,
companies can better understand their social media ROI. With this data, they
can invest in social media more wisely and allocate the time and money spent on
each platform based on a cost/benefit analysis.
Feedback
It is important to understand what types of content and
posts your audience cares about and relates to. Through analytics, social media
managers can look for trends, and use this analysis to better create posts
targeted at what their audiences are interested in. These findings may be
applicable to marketing strategies through other mediums as well.
Social media is an ideal way to communicate with customers
and should be used to its full advantage in terms of understanding the target
market and finding optimal ways to communicate with them. Using analytics to
determine what content is providing the greatest impact can also help deter
from “me marketing” and help ensure that your content is relevant to your audience.
Competitive Analysis
Analyzing and assessing competitor’s social media presence
gives your company an opportunity to explore best practices within your
industry. While this will not allow for a competitive advantage, it does allow
for competitive parity and can be extremely beneficial. This can be
particularly important for smaller businesses that can use an analysis of
leading competitor’s practices to improve their own strategy.
Custom Campaign
Tracking
Social Media influence can also be measured through
customizable tools, such as Google Analytics Custom Campaigns. Using the
correct tags, companies can track specific social media posts and campaigns.
They can see how many users are brought to the site, how many pages were viewed
once there, how many unique visits were produced, and how many users were
converted into customers based off of the specific campaign or post. Obviously,
by tracking specific campaigns and promotions so thoroughly, companies can
easily see which were successful and which were not. Companies could potentially
use this tool to execute a type of A/B testing through social media and find
out how to produce optimal content.
Prior to trying to measure and quantify your social media
influence through analytics, it is important to assess why you are using social
media in the first place. What are your goals through social media? Are you
trying to improve your brand awareness? Grow your customer base? Learn more
about your current target market? Once you can clearly understand the scope of
what you are trying to accomplish through social media, it becomes much easier
to use web analytics in order to measure and quantify your social media impact.
What other social media metrics do you think are important?
Comment and let me know what you think!
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