Social Media Measurment: What To Measure And How

Chris Marentis — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 12:39:19 +0000

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?

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Does Social Media Measure Up?

Chris Marentis — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 03:08:11 +0000

Social media is not voodoo marketing. It ’s a new way of marketing using the distributed and social web to cast a wide net and ultimately drive prospects into your purchase funnel. The great thing about social media marketing is it doesn’t cost a huge amount of money to try new things. So, the idea is to have various of elements of a strategy working together to build a powerful new marketing channel for your business.

The key to making this all work is tracking. You need to have good measurement so you can make adjustments along the way. Eliminate wasted activity and do more of what is working. Chris Brogan recently posted about how he approaches measurement with clients in the context of a social media marketing engagement. I found that post very helpful. Here are some key metrics we focus on:

What is tracking?

Keeping track of specific measurements or metrics
Keeping track of customers and prospects

In other words, tracking is keeping track of results…novel idea, accountability in social media!

But, Social media is not a science

It’s important to take action, then see if/what works
Based on our experience we know that most anything will work (improve results), the question is return on time and effort
The important thing to know is we do not have to be OPTIMAL to launch. Since the costs associated with doing any one thing is so low, with the right measurement, we can make adjustments quickly

So, why measure and track?

Know what you are doing is working
Know what you are doing is not working
Know what your market is doing in reaction to what you are doing
Have data upon which to make clear decisions
If you don’t track, you can’t improve

What to Track?

Everything that leads up to a sale or action;

Lead sources/traffic sources- how well they work
Conversion (what converts)

Track Traffic

Know how much traffic comes from each lead source
How well each of those sources perform
Cost per lead
Velocity of results
Absolute number of leads (changes versus prior periods)

Ratios

Email/contact to visitor
Visitor to opt-in
Opt-in to purchase/Inquiry
Email/contacts to purchase
Lead to qualified lead
Lead to purchase/customer

Key lead Gen Metrics

Cost per lead
Cost per customer
Cost per revenue dollar

Measurement and tracking tools

Google Analytics and Conversion tracker- Track traffic and sources to your site
Hypertracker- Tracking management system for marketing
Your shopping cart system and/or autoresponder
Budurl- Track links on all your distributed content
Clicktail- Heat maps and click-stream data for your website
Feedburner- RSS tracker

Now get started…you will be a much better social media marketer because of it.

Their are tons of tracking tools available. What are your favorite?