Social Media Measurement- Measuring the Success of Your Social Media Program
So here’s my thing with social media measurement – there are like 40 programs out there claiming they can help you measure social media, and not one that actually measures any of the 
things our teams are reporting on. Every single one of these tools aggregates tweets and blog posts about your brand and then graphs 
mentions of you and your competitors. But in my opinion, that is such a small, small piece of the puzzle and says nothing about how your social media strategy is directly increasing revenue. Here is my problem with this as a measurement of success for your social media strategy:
1. So there’s a lot of chatter about you in SM - How is that a reflection of your social media campaign? Was there a lot of chatter about your brand before you began social media? Could it be that the chatter is a result of a great PR hit, a new product, a new ad campaign? Is the chatter even really about you? How much of it is spam, or a misspelling, or an unrelated mention? Is it positive, neutral, or negative? Measuring overall volume of social mentions is interesting, sure, but it doesn’t actually tell you anything about how the dollars spent on your social media campaign is influencing your customers spending habits. Rather than a measurement of social media strategy, I see these tools that measure the volume of online chatter as a separate (albeit related) function of online reputation management (and one that should come with its own budget line item).
2. Comparing your share of voice to your competitors - Again, how is this a reflection of your success with social media strategy? So what if your competitor is getting 1,000 more tweets than you are. Are they doing anything about it? Are they engaging with these people? Perhaps they are receiving higher chatter because they are just downright more popular. Social media isn’t magic. If your company isn’t well liked then that will be reflected in a competitive analysis of the social space. Again, there are just too many variables at work here for it to be a true measure the success of your social media strategy.
Alternatively, for social media strategists, I’d recommend creating a social media audit (something we’ve done for several our social media clients) and updating this on a semi-regular basis. In this audit you identify top competitors and what these companies are doing in the social space. Then analyze the level of engagement they receive and the tactics they employ. This will give you direct insight into the changes you can make in your own programs and the success that these competitors are seeing as a result of their actions.
3. Finally, my biggest beef with these tools is that what they report are all things we have to gather anyway in the day-to-day execution. In order to run a successful social media campaign you have to be paying attention on a daily, real-time basis to info 
directed to you, about you and about your competitors. We have various team members set up searches for terms (everything from our client’s name to broader searches like “things to do in San Diego”) and these people are tasked with assessing the needed level of engagement with what they find. Having a tool that I have to log in, and then sort through tons of spam isn’t efficient. Furthermore, when I run these searches directly in Facebook or on Twitter or in Google blog search, I don’t need to switch screens to respond.
Oh yea, and all these manual searches are free.
I feel that I should re-iterate that I think all of these tools are useful, I just don’t think they fall under the umbrella of social media strategy or reporting. I think these tools help with a larger analysis on company success. Additionally, I think that capturing this data should be part of a larger online brand/reputation management (complete with influencer outreach programs, blog comment strategy and quarterly reports to R&D about the online perception of your products and services). Is there overlap, yes. Is this something you can squeeze into current social media campaigns/budgets? In my opinion – no.
So what is it that I do want? I want a tool that helps save me time measuring the success of my strategy. A tool that actually speaks to ROI. I want a tool that easily aggregates everything I am measuring to show the direct result of the actions we are making in the social space. Specifically, I want a tool that pulls everything in and then makes graphs for me.
I want something that pulls in my number of fans, followers and visits to our blog. I’d like to see the number of comments, wall posts, fan photos @ replies, DM’s, RT’s and lists without having to login to each account to capture. I want a tool that auto refreshes Klout score and includes Tweetreach functionality to show the possible Twitter impressions per month. I want a program to pull from Google Analytics to tell me how much traffic came directly from Facebook and Twitter and I want it to tell me how many bitly click-throughs I got per month. Essentially I want all of this to happen without me, or anyone on my team, having to log in and count over and over and I want it all to happen in ONE place. For those few measurements of success that I may never be able to have aggregated (eg. number of redemption from social media contests) I’d like a tool to give me the functionality to add in these few exceptions and then auto graph them. This tool, a dream tool, would simplify reporting the amount of direct engagement with your brand, the increase of traffic attributed from social media, and the money spent as a result of a comprehensive social media strategy. I believe this tool would be a true measure of the success of your strategy, specifically, and could help agencies prove why their social media strategy services are valuable.
So, what do you think. Any programmers up for the challenge? Any social media marketers think they could use a tool like this?
Radian 6 is a very powerful tool but its really open. I use it all of the time it can do most of what you want it to do but its work to get it there. This is both the beauty and difficulty of Radian 6 as a tool. It requires creativity and skill to accomplish your objectives. I can tell right away when and where the chatter comes from I can score a blog or twitter user in seconds and track it (all within the tool). It took about a year to get to this point but it is possible… I can even track some direct sales ROI through filters.
The tool you are looking for can probably be done but Im not sure how well it would work. Sysomos probably gets closest to what you are looking for and its a little easier to use than radian 6. Sysomos ease of use comes at a cost in terms of the power that the tool has. It sounds like you might be ok with that. The other problem with automation is the fact that you are dealing with humans, which means no keyword set will ever be perfect…
Also when you start monitoring I suggest establishing a baseline for keywords… it lets you see spikes and dips in chatter as time goes on!
Thanks Mike – I appreciate your comment. I’m actually looking for a tool that is less about monitoring and more about reporting account statistics. However, I’ll take a look at Sysomos and see if they have that ability. Thanks!
Would be nice
Interesting take. The issue here is that you aren’t doing social media listening and comparison, you are doing social media engagement and scoreboarding, but trying to use listening software to guide engagement and track success metrics that extend well beyond listening and engagement. That’s a square peg/round hole problem. CoTweet is probably the best option for what you initially describe a la “thing to do in San Diego.”
Also, the challenge is in thinking about social media engagement as a “campaign” which implies a beginning and an end. It’s not a campaign, it’s forever. Thus, the success metrics should perhaps be less focused on immediacy, and more focused on market share and revenue over a longer period.
You ask for the need to calculate social media ROI, but none of the specific data points you seek are directly rooted in ROI, which is always a financial metric expressed as a percentage. Klout has nothing to do with ROI. Bit.ly has nothing to do with ROI. Wall posts have nothing to do with ROI. Traffic to the blog has nothing to do with ROI. At least not directly. You are looking to measure and calculate awareness and engagement metrics. That’s totally fine, but it’s not ROI. I’m not sure why tracking clicks on a bit.ly link is a valuable metric, but number of people tweeting about your brand is not? A click is perhaps a deeper indication of brand loyalty, but not by much, and not always. If someone tweets what a great experience they had with the brand, is that not more beneficial than someone clicking a link you tweeted?
Part of the reason the all-encompassing tool you request doesn’t exist is that it would require combining data from a ton of other places. Heavy, heavy API work there. Doable, but tough. It will happen though. But right now, more software companies are focused on building the diagnostic tools (Klout, bit.ly) rather than the aggregation of them, because that’s where the $$$ is.
However, I would take a hard look at SwixApp, because it brings a lot of the stuff you request into one interface. Not 100%, but closer than anything else out there, by far.
Jay Baer´s last blog ..5 Ways to Turn Helpfulness Into Marketing Greatness
Hi Jay,
Thanks for your comment. I always love to hear from you.
As for your first point, you mention that we are doing social media engagement and scoreboarding vs listening and comparison. In truth, we are definitely listening and comparing, we just aren’t including that as a metric in social media reporting. It is an integral part of our strategy. We’ve been using Twitter Search, setting up search terms on Tweetdeck/Seesmic, running Google Blog Searches, and Facebook searches to keep a pulse on what is going on about the brands we work with and their competitors. I’ve found these free tools to be very effective in helping me catch what is being said outside of who is talking directly to us.
In regards to what you said about long-term metrics of success – yes, I see what you are saying about how an increase in share of voice online and increase in revenue could show long-term success. However I’ve taken that metric to a client before and had them say, “so? How do we know that is attributed to social media?” And the answer is, we don’t. We never will. So that’s why we’ve created metrics that, at least for the clients I’ve worked with, have been more tangible numbers. (eg increase in awareness, loyalty, etc).
As for ROI, you are right in that they don’t prove ROI in the true definition of the term. That being said, for clients, those numbers (the engagement numbers, the website traffic, the percentage of people who come through the doors via social media contests) these numbers show clearly why social media is worth their time and their money. They show the direct correlation. You pay this, we do this, and then this happens.
As for your question about people tweeting that they had a great experience with your brand. I tried to address that in my post, but will do so again. Do I think this is valuable information? Yes. But if they aren’t tweeting at/with you, they are clearly unaware of your social media presence, and therefore not engaged with you at all. So if they are tweeting about how great their stay was at the hotel but they aren’t tweeting it to me, at the hotel, how is that a measurement of my success with social media? Is it a measurement of the hotel’s success, staff, services? Yes. However I haven’t been tasked with measuring that. Just with the success of our social media plan. Now in that particular instance, I’d be monitoring for that tweet, so I would follow them and thank them directly, thus informing them that we have a social media presence. This is usually returned by a follow, which therefore puts me in direct contact with them on a daily basis. So again, is that tweet valuable information. Yes. Does it measure social media success. I still say, no.
The real truth is, we could spend hours a day measuring all the different aspects of social media. And the SM strategist side of me who loves this kind of stuff, wants to do just that. However, the side of me who is working with budgets and attempting to prioritize what is the best way to spend a client’s money, says that this is not the top priority. When I don’t even have enough time to build out all the tabs I want, or respond to every question on Twitter, I just can’t justify adding in yet another measurement tactic, especially one so loosely linked to actual SM success.
Thanks for your thoughts, Jay!
-Callan
I know what you’re saying, especially about the day-to-day realities of budgets. And if clients are satisfied knowing that tweets led to page views (or similar metrics), great.
But ultimately, the goal shouldn’t be for you to justify the success of your campaign, or to find a way to build more tabs. The goal should be to make the client money by building their business.
Ultimately, the goal of the social media plan should be to support whatever the strategic plan is for the company, which most definitely is not acquiring followers.
Perhaps I wrote the comment poorly, but I’m not suggesting that you measure more things, I’m suggesting that you measure fewer things, and not worry as much about bit.ly clicks and followers and other micro-metrics. But instead, find a correlation between those hard-earned successes and top line or bottom line business metrics. Is that harder to do? Of course. But as a leading agency in this space, part of your job needs to be showing clients the big picture, not letting them settle for silos and short-term wins.
The point isn’t to be good at social media. The point is to use social media to be good at business.
Jay Baer´s last blog ..5 Ways to Turn Helpfulness Into Marketing Greatness
I don’t disagree that SM should support the companies overall goals and look big picture. I just don’t agree that measuring social mentions or graphing SM growth next to revenue growth, makes that point. Perhaps the answer isn’t out there yet. Or perhaps it never will be. The PR world has struggled to make an “ROI” for years. The old, antiquated system of measuring column width/length, comparing it to ad rates in the publications and multiplying by 3, was a headache and still left many clients going, so? Many agencies, including our own stopped doing such ROI’s because the amount of time it took to complete them wasn’t worth it. Our clients understand the worth of our PR services aren’t always tangible and a great article in Time Magazine won’t necessarily mean thousands of revenue that week.
I have to wonder if SM may go down that path one day soon. You either get how these measurements of loyalty and engagement, traffic, etc, help your bottom line. Or you don’t.
In the end, the solution probably varies per client. I do have an idea of how I want BG to increase our monitoring, analytics, online brand management portion of our business, so perhaps I’ll be in touch with you about that soon. And if my idea plays out how I think it should, we may just have a solution that addresses both our points.
Thanks for the input, Jay!
Callan
I may be a bit of topic…But am trying to answer the question of how to value a social media activity.
A mass of people that mention a brand/product once in a blue moon (which is really what monitoring aggregates with nice charts) is far less valuable than a handful of ones who frequently share brand updates with the communities they belong to, and of course, they tend to get those brand updates from your social media activities.
Any social media strategy should have a ‘targeting’ step where, by looking at the entire social media sphere, one chooses to focus on a few communities because of their relevance to a brand’s marketing objectives. After all your social media activities exists to influence perceptions and allow them to traverse the network of existing connections following an invisible path of relevance to reach hopefully your entire target audience. The communities you carefully choose are the level 1 of this network and you can measure how successful are your activities toward this first layer by measuring stuff the community send backs to you (mentions, relationship/connections, traffic, links to a blog etc…). Of course such an approach make you miss a lot of good data (but as you said in your example of the hotel, it’s impossible) but at least you can tie the data you get back to your sm activity. When it comes to measuring, scope control is very helpful or you end up with measure that are very hard to interpret/analyze in a meaningful way.
Laurent
ROI measurement of Social Media, now that’s funny. ROI is a measurement based on incremental revenue above and beyond that of doing nothing. It’s not simply associating sales to your media effort. You can not measure ROI without a control group. Don’t even think of saying my control is the “baseline” or “Forecast”, it’s not accurate (don’t even start me on Percent error). If you could establish a sample size of known internet users, identify test/control cells and conduct your experiment, establish explicit matching of sales to media chatter, then go for it. I think that’s not plausible without logistical data collection nightmares. it’s mass media people, you are in the same boat as Advertisers when it comes to measurement. It’s not marketing, it’s advertising and less controllable at that. Your clients will have to be happy with engagement and awareness metrics similar to search or display and forget about ROI and accept the “Cost of doing Business” as an answer. Does it still have value, I think so, I just can’t tell you how much or how cost effective.
I actually completely agree with you David, but unfortunately not all clients are as understanding of the challenges you outlined. I don’t think the whole ROI and social media discussion will be disappearing anytime soon. Thanks for the comment.
[...] is, it is very difficult to measure your Social Media success in the first place. If you are like us that success might come in the tens of customers for our [...]
the Social media metrics calculations will come to life when people begin to scan bar codes into facebook/twitter/google + as a part of a buyer/shopper loyalty system