Social Media Measurement: Get the Quick Wins

This blog post is an excerpt from “6 Social Media Strategy Tips for Market Leadership“.

In this post, we will help guide you through the often misunderstood world of social media measurement. It’s not cut and dry, and it takes work to collect the appropriate information.

Identify areas where data is readily available (i.e. Google Analytics or customer relationship management reports)

When you are first starting out in social media, you will need to demonstrate some type of movement, whether that is increased conversions, or correlation of engagement metrics to lower costs, revenue, or market insights. That is the best you will be able to do in the beginning. Find the data that is easily captured and present it to management. You will need to show management that numbers are trending in a positive light. You can use social analytics tools like Hootsuite combined with Google Analytics to show the initial performance. From here, you can ask for budget to expand your measurement capabilities by integrating data sources into one dashboard, or a social crm.

Align data collection with your business goals

If you don’t specify what your business goals are then you will be buried in a pile of useless data. For example, if increased sales leads is the goal, then retweets or likes might not be the best data source to present to management. A better data source would be referral traffic from social sites that convert into downloads or event registrations. At the operational level, retweets and likes might be a signal of driving more referral traffic, but this is something that should be reported on the functional/operational level.

Create control groups for measuring lift in sales or cost reduction attributed to social media.

To see where social media impacts bottom line metrics, you will need to compare the results of actions that are taken in social media to actions without social media. Nichole Kelly of Full Frontal ROI explains this in-depth on Social Media Examiner.

For example, if you want to see if people convert to sales better when originating from social media compared to people that originate from offline events like tradeshows, you will compare the two channels side by side in your CRM software.

Conclusion

After reading, hopefully you have an idea of where to look for data collection. After some time if you can show that you are achieving momentum, ask for the budget to expand your measurement capabilities.

Have you identified the easy wins for data collection? What are your challenges for expanding?