Last week in our ‘social media objectives’ series, we explored how to measure brand perception so this week, given that the two are often mistaken for each other, let’s take a look at how to measure brand awareness.
Social media brand awareness refers to how many people you reach through your social media activities – you want to find out how many pairs of eyes saw your brand and what action was taken as a result.
A good place to start is by breaking brand awareness down into these elements:
Exposure
Firstly, you need to measure the reach that you achieved using metrics such as the number of fans, followers, subscribers, impressions, basically anyone who had the potential to see it.
Influence
Influencers have a loyal and often very large following. Their followers are more likely to engage and/or take action so this exposure is much more powerful than general exposure. Once you know who your influencers are, you need to know how many of them mentioned you and the reach of their audience. For example, if they have a total of 100,000 followers, that equates to 100,000 impressions.
Engagement
Now you need to measure how people interacted with your social media efforts, such as:
- Click-throughs
- Likes
- Comments
- Site visits
- New followers
- Mentions
- Direct messages
- Re-tweets
- Shares
Financial Value
Once you’ve tracked these metrics over a period of time, you’ll naturally want to place a financial value on your efforts to demonstrate that they’ve had a positive effect on your business. These might include:
- Decrease in cost per impression
- Decrease in cost per website visit
- Decrease in cost per engagement
Got your content ready?
Of course, in order to increase your number of likes, shares, comments, followers etc, you need to ensure that your content is high quality, original and worthy of sharing. If you need help with creating content, just give us a shout on 0845 658 3334.
Next week…how to measure lead generation
Read more: How to Use Incentives to Get More Fans & Followers