The above is from slide 20 of the Altimeter Group’s deck on Social Business Forecast 2011. The previous slide said that the top thing that corporate social media strategists are focused on in 2011 is creating ROI measurements.
In order to do that, you need to be measuring the right metrics. Look at the above slide and note that the most popular metrics that corp social media strategists are tracking are ones associated with engagement. Now if your goal for using social media is to build engagement, then that’s fine. But if your goal is to generate sales, then measuring your number of Twitter followers is a terribly weak metric to measure.
If you want to improve your ability to measure the value of your social media efforts then start measuring metrics associated with the action you want people to take.
For example, if you want to use your blog as a tool to generate sales, then you need to focus on metrics that are tied to product sales, or interest. Such as, signups for a product demo, number of times you are contacted for more information about a product, downloads of brochures etc associated with the product, referrals from the blog to a specific product page. Or….actual sales generated on the blog.
All of those metrics are tied to the action you want the user to take, buying a product. They all indicate someone that is interested in the product and that indicates a potential customer.
On the flipside, if you are using your blog to generate sales, why measure traffic? Traffic is almost meaningless, you need to measure what people do AFTER they arrive on your blog.
Here’s some examples of picking better metrics:
Notice as you go down that list of metrics, you are getting closer to your actual goal of generating sales. That’s what you need to be striving to do. A lot of the chatter we’ve heard over the past couple of years is about the inability to accurately measure the ROI of social media. A good deal of that isn’t due to deficiencies in the tools, but rather in the measurement process.
Put your metrics on trial, and make sure that you are measuring what you should be.
BTW need help designing a better measurement program for your social media efforts? Check out my social media training options.
While I agree that social media interaction are hard to tie to whether it lead to a sale or not, it can’t be totally taken out of the equation. Yes online mentions can sometimes be a weak measurement as your slide points out, if you can show that a week with a lot of social mentions was also a week where a lot of leads and/or sales came in, then I think you can genuinely connect the two things together.
I’m not disagreeing with the point you’re making here Mack, I’m not just fully agreeing. I think that all those measurements will matter to some degree.
Cheers,
Sheldon, community manager for Sysomos
Sheldon you’re right, I’m probably going too far to make my point. Which is, companies shouldn’t just look at engagement metrics or traffic cause those are the easiest numbers to find. It’s damn easy to find traffic, for example, but what the hell does it tell you?
I just don’t like ‘lazy’ metrics. I want their to be a methodology behind how a company measures its social media efforts.
Good solid advice Mack. I’ve also found that product page referrals and/or shopping list/spec sheets can be good indicators. One metric I’ve started tracking for a CPG client is referrals to a retailers’ store locator / product locator. That certainly signals at least an intent to buy and we can present those referral numbers to the retailer as added value.
Bingo, that signals intent or at least interest in buying.
Or back to Sheldon’s point, if the goal is to raise awareness and improve online reputation and you can track a spike in positive mentions, that suggests that the company’s social media efforts are working.
Exactly. The thing that works best for me is finding out what metric the boss/client thinks is most important and then find or invent a way to measure or evaluate it.
You know what I think Mack? It’s very easy to measure your ROI. What’s hard is knowing how to do it in first place.
As you say, if you measure your level of engagement, you might be committing a terrible mistake. It’s extremely easy to measure your engagement on every platform, but is it the right thing to do? Does it make any sense?
What I think is, if your SM strategy is poorly planned – IF it’s planned at all, mind you – deciding what to measure, and why to measure it, that’s the hardest task at hand.
Mack, perhaps this is what you and Sheldon are saying, but I think the point is not that the less specific metrics aren’t valuable, it’s that you can’t be satisfied with measuring only things like follower count or engagement. For example, if you’re trying to generate sales on your website, it’s as important to understand what generates traffic to your site as it is to understand what you do post-click to increase conversions.
Going back to your article, I agree completely that just measuring engagement metrics won’t be enough for most companies (but at least we’ve moved on from only measuring follower counts!).