Brandhacker Infographic Rating (Hackin!, Status Quo, Lame): Status Quo
As I say more and more, business executives in marketing and finance want to know the true ROI coming from the budgets they are expending on people and platforms for social media campaigning. Hence, as the industry gets closer to KPIs and metrics which truly value the attribution of a conversation in a social media environment toward the sale of a product or service (on a brand page platform via an e-commerce conversion or a pdf download, or even an in-store sale), finance is aware they can push the social peeps to show them where the money is.
Build a Social Media Measurement Plan
This excellent 101 infographic puts it all into perspective, showing us how (before we send the entire team off to seed content and post links to offers and coupons via bit.ly URLs) to develop our social media measurement plan. Are you taking these steps? Or are you jumping the gun (like so many still are)? eInteractive outlines the five key steps you should be taking to leap past your competition in using social media marketing:
- Step 1: Define measurable & actionable KPIs (key performance indicators)
- Remember KPIs show intent toward a larger picture assessment, e.g. a Facebook "Like" can be a KPI for your site PDF download, or it could develop into a key indicator of site side e-commerce sales. The goal is to identify the metrics which can help you tell a story for the performance of a KPI toward a larger marketing goal
- Step 2: Configure your analytics
- Segment your KPIs and metrics, set up action "event" track codes and landing pages, review your copy
- Step 3: Use other social analytics tools
- If you were unfortunately diagnosed with cancer by a physician, would you not go to another physician for a second opinion? The same with a major investment in social media analytics: have a major online social media problem or opportunity to reach and engage customers? Try a few social analytics tools together (different perspectives will deepen evaluation reports)
- Step 4: Understand each social metric
- Segment your metrics out so you can evaluate them in context:
- Loyalty data - apply to brand goals
- Activity data - apply to engagement goals
- Profile data - apply to demographic targeting goals
- etc.
- Step 5: Revise your strategy
- Don't think of analytics as back end anymore! It's not - anymore. Digital data is now so measurable and actionable that Analytics now informs strategic planning (day over day, week over week, quarter over quarter) in a real time basis. Be very very afraid of your analytics peeps; they are now going to tell digital strategists in real-time if any of their "strategies" and "tactics" are working - in real time
