Social Media Measurment: What To Measure And How

Social media marketing works…it’s just hard to know what part is working best. With literally unlimited opportunities to participate and use social media, you need to know what is effective to dial in your efforts and become more efficient over time. You need to be focused, and spend time wisely or social media marketing can quickly become a time sink. This is about leads and conversion, not making friends!

What should you be measuring? We thinking about it in two ways, content and context.

Content is what you say. You want to measure what seems to be most interesting to your target audience, and are they interested in our content. Context is how we frame our content. This could be anything from keywords, posts, headlines, vehicle…what makes the content interesting. Context is the key to making others want your content and share it with others.

The goal is to track both content and context so you get an idea of the effectiveness of various ways to frame your messages. That is where optimization really begins.

So how do you measure social media? Their is an overwhelming number of URL shorteners with tracking built in so you can measure clicks. Many of them focus and measure different parts of the social media spectrum like micro blogging (twitter) or links (like anchor text in social media sites). You can also use Google Analytics to measure site referrals, even pages within a URL.

Tons of good options exist but we will focus on one for now to make this very simple. Bud URL is simple and effective for measuring both content and context. Bud URL truncates those big URL addresses you want to point to and gives you a shortened version that is tracked. The shorted URL can then be inserted into any social media vehicle, Facebook anchor text, Twitter tweet, and email autoresponder…whatever.

The analytics dashboard is really easy to use and understand. You’ll get valuable information about what content and context is working for your marketing effort and how to keep improving your effort. Combined with Google Analytics, you will have a very good handle on what is working for your social media marketing efforts.

Experiment with different programs if you like, but the key is to do it. Measurement will make you a better social media marketer by improving conversions and the quality of your list building efforts.

What do you think?