Social Media Executive Primer Part 7

Measuring Success

Metrics from Social Media are a hot topic these days. Even the ability to actually measure true ROI is under debate. New Social Media metrics acronyms such as ROE (Return on Engagement), RORE (Return on Ripple Effect) and others muddy the metric waters even more.

Still new tools are launching every day to help make the impact of Social Media more quantifiable. Traditional clipping services are now offering daily insight into who is saying what about you. Social Media ROI calculators abound. But you have to ask yourself – so what? What it comes down to is what specific metrics do I need to make decisions?

To answer this, you’ll need to articulate your overall objectives. Are you looking to increase your website traffic? Are you looking to add qualified leads to your funnel? Are you interested in expanding the reach of your overall brand? Are you looking to increase your blog subscriptions? The list goes on and on.

Social Media Analytics

Website Traffic
Social Media that drives traffic to your website is a good (and easy) place to start. While you may already incorporate web analytics tools such as Google Analytics, Woopra or Omniture, some don’t always measure the effects of social media effectively out of the box. But 3rd party extension are now being developed that help bridge the gap.

If you use Eloqua, they recentlfy released 'sub sites' which allow website vistor tracking specifically from social media sites. There is a new application developed for use with Omniture (Now part of Adobe) that tracks page-level statistics on a variety of social media platforms including Facebook and LinkedIn. Greasemonkey offers an extension that adds a social media information layer to Google Analytics, providing information on Diggs, stumbles, delicious bookmarks and others. Do a search for “Blog Metrics” and you’ll see a host of other available apps.

As with any website traffic metric, showing the volume of traffic to your site is one thing, but you are probably more interested in conversions. How many filled out and submitted a form? If you use a marketing automation tool such as Eloqua, you can easily track conversions of any form, including the source of the submitter. If you have Eloqua integrated with your CRM you can track full closed-loop ROI reporting, including opportunities, closed-won specifically generated from your blogs, etc. Eloqua has also just released a new social media viral tool that allows prospects to easily repurpose and share your content on their own social networks. Integrated reporting helps track which social media sites are driving traffic to your website.

Even if you don’t currently deploy any website analytics, there are some stand-alone apps that will help. Here are some you might consider:

SocialToo is a tool for creating social surveys and tracking social stats on Twitter and Facebook. It also will send you a daily email describing follows and unfollows.

Xinureturns: Offers a dashboard overview of your website’s standing in social media. Run a report and you will receive stats on Technorati, Google Pagerank, Diggs. It also includes backlinks to your website.

PostRank offers detailed information on Tweets, stumbles, diggs, and FriendFeed all in one place.

Bit.ly: If you use a URL shortener, it’s a good idea make sure it has analytics information as well. Bity.ly is one such app. It will track information including the number of clicks, traffic sources, even the time clicks occur.

Blog Traffic
Another fairly easy metric you can incorporate is the “stickiness” of your blog. You can track subscriber growth, reader comments vs. views, etc. As mentioned above there are a number of tools that act like web analytics tools but are specifically designed for your blogs, posts, etc. It’s a good way to judge the success of your social media efforts on their own.

Track as Campaigns
You can segment your efforts into campaigns and track them that way, providing a campaign ID in the query string for any subsequent form submission.

Additional Social Media Metrics Resources:
http://www.radian6.com/
http://www.techrigy.com/

Part 1-Social Media: An Executive Primer
Part 2-Define Your Strategy
Part 3-Define Your Purpose
Part 4-Define Your Voice
Part 5-Audience Relationships
Part 6-How to Start
Part 7-Measuring Success
Part 8-Social Media Do’s and Don’ts

Updated 5-8-12
Visit my brand new website and learn more about Social Media Marketing Best Practices

Steve Kellogg

-Demand Generation/Marketing Automation Consultant, Astadia
-Eloqua Certified Marketing Best Practices Consultant