Measuring the Success of Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is growing. However, this new medium is still in its infancy. While it is developing at an exponential rate, there are downsides that accompany new marketing media. Perhaps the largest downside of social media marketing is the lack of key metrics to measure the success of a marketing campaign.

With the wide reach and immediacy attached to social marketing, it is easy to see why it has become an essential tool to organizations. Clay McDaniel, managing director of Spring Creek Group, outlines the three big questions surrounding social media marketing:

What should we measure?
How do we measure it?
What does success look like?

McDaniel describes three tools that can be used to measure social media marketing success.

One: Total Online Community Size
How many people are following your twitter account? How many have liked your brand’s Facebook page? How many are following your blog? The collection of social media followers gives marketers a good place to start counting. While sheer numbers may not mean a lot, McDaniel points out that any growth of these numbers is worth noticing.

Two: Monthly Referred Social Traffic to Site
Focus on traffic coming to your website from links shared through social media outlets. This can show how far your brand has branched into the digital world.

Three: Number of mentions
While followers may be important, how often is your brand the topic of conversation? After all, social media is all about communication in the digital world, and you want to be part of the conversation.

Einstein once said, “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” Perhaps many companies share this view and simply think that an online presence is all that is needed.

Dexter Bustarde, senior web analyst with Digitaria, shares his thoughts on the measurement of success within social media marketing:

“…social media measurement could mean anything from PR and reputation management to Twitter reports to broad “engagement” measurement to looking at Facebook Insights day to day. In truth, all of those things should inform a social media measurement program, but at the same time, if we’re talking standardization, it’s a lot of work to get it all under one umbrella.”

Having worked in a data management position in the past, it is easy for me to see the importance of data and the effect it holds on business decisions. In order to see their money has been well invested, employers want to see the return on their marketing funding. This is particularly difficult with social media. However, one of the key steps to a marketing campaign is the follow-up evaluation. As social media marketing steps out of its infancy, I expect the measuring metrics of this media to evolve with it.

Image compliments of searchenginewatch.com