Social Media Measurement tracks social media to see how visible a brand or person is in the public eye. This is done through various monitoring platforms usually by some sort of marketing department or company. Social media in this sense covers everything from news sites to Twitter, and can measure the volume of everything from a person, to a campaign, or a brand. Here are a few reasons why social media measurement is vital to the success of your social media marketing campaign.
Exposure
This sort of information can be extremely helpful in assessing how far you have infiltrated the market and what demographics are really being hit at a fraction of what other forms of market research cost. This lets any company understand why they are or are not successful. This is invaluable information for the small business owner, politician, aspiring actor, or large corporation. Social media measurement can give information not only on a national, but also on a local level, which is why it is important for anyone looking to improve their visibility in the market they are working in.
Visibility
Social media visibility can be vital to a company’s success. Even if there are advertisements on every billboard in town, if there isn’t any visibility on social media, such as Facebook likes or tweets, then a company can seriously suffer. Aside from the overall success of a business, it can also assess how effective a particular marketing campaign may be. As more and more bloggers tweet their friends about a product, the more visibility it can receive. When there is a blog highlighting a person or product, and it is the pinned on Pinterest, there is a wide demographic that can be reached for a very low cost. This information accessed through social media measurement can help individuals re-allocate funds to more effective marketing strategies.
Influence
Not only does social media measurement assess data and numbers, but it can also assess public reaction to a certain product. It gives access to what clients are thinking about products or people. This allows a company insight into their client’s minds and can help businesses pick up on trends. That means they know not just what clients think of a product now, but what they are likely to think of it in the future. This can be valuable information regarding any target audience, and needs to be carefully monitored so that correct decisions can be made by a company.
Engagement
Sometimes it just gets too quantitative and it’s very easy to fall into the trap of playing just a numbers game. More likes, tweets does not necessarily mean that you’re doing well, especially if all that traffic was bought. We should also take note of the quality of data collected and although the process might be tedious, it is helpful to look at what people comment about your brand, what people are actually tweeting about your products (as it could be negative or positive remarks) and any good marketer would know all these are important information that could help you improve your brand as a whole.
Competitive Mind Share
Last, but not least, this information allows individuals not only to track their products, but also competitor’s activity and exactly how big your piece of the pie is. Measuring how much of the market share, or even visibility that you hold, can help anyone decide on a marketing strategy. Tracking competitors helps to know not just what they are doing, but what you should be doing.
The process of measuring social media will prove more beneficial if you use clever tactics to implement the process. This basically equates to higher return on investments (ROI) for those who implemented it in an effective manner. The main bulk of this article talked about how social media measurement is important for determining and generating brand awareness.
Here are a few other snippets of information that tells us how social media measurement could generate better quality leads.
Dependence on Social Metrics
You can’t rely on just Facebook likes and Twitter tweets to determine the effectiveness of your entire social marketing efforts because they are not customised to cater to your needs. If you desire to achieve utmost results then you’ll have use your site as an experimental social hub and draw in crowds that will engage in quality conversations (through comments) that will provide you quality data to improve on your brand.
Interacting and Feedbacking
Comments and suggestions aren’t always automatically generated so sometimes we need to have call-to-actions at the end of a blog post for instance, “What do you think?”. Simultaneously, it’s also good to interact with whoever’s giving comments that facilitate discussion and whenever appropriate, you could always come in to clarify some misconceptions consumers have about your brand or simply even ask for more feedback. Measurement’s one thing, but stimulating your prospects for more feedback takes you to another level in social media marketing.
Management focus
You’ll end up noticing how certain platforms perform better in terms of social signals but once again that’s just quantitative figures. Once you’ve determined which of these platforms provide more qualitative results, you can focus your social media marketing efforts there and maximize your profit potential. Similarly, this also gives the opportunity to try a different social platform to see how much traffic. For example, Pinterest would be a good way to share your highly visual content and if you see your traffic shooting through the roof because your organization is using this social platform, you’ll definitely know where to pay more of your marketing efforts to.
Going Beyond the “Last Click”
Many start-up marketers might not realize it but they tend to do a good job of doing everything right in terms of attracting potential prospects, but what happens after? Customers are influenced into liking a company’s product page but that at most raises awareness and slight publicity for the brand. What is important is that we go beyond the last-click attribute and provide the customer a little more incentive. Something like a free giveaway would give prospects a little more motivation and the results of this mini-campaign can be easily measured to see if this works on the targeted demographic.
Overall, social media tracking is important because it gives an individual information and data on visibility, public opinion and competitors for a fraction of the cost of most market research. The indirect implications it plays such as lead generation and feedback makes it not only important, but vital to anyone looking to increase their visibility, infiltration into the public eye as well as profit-making potential.
With all that’s said, how are you measuring your social metrics?
About Daniel Tan
