A Meme about Measuring Social Media Marketing (Say that 10 times fast!)
Stoney de Geyter at Pole Position Marketing and of E-Marketing Performance fame has tagged me. Seems he wants to know how I measure Social Media Marketing.
I pondered this very topic without solid conclusions on Nov 1st in a post entitled: Social Media: Marketing or Measurement? So now is as good a time as ever to revisit the topic.
First of all, I will answer the question I posed at the beginning of the month: Social Media is both measurement and marketing.
Social Media can be a great way to measure Branding efforts, more so when they are carefully coordinated and monitored with traditional, offline branding campaigns. Results from such campaigns can be measured by tracking “friends” on social networks, “followers” and mentions on Twitter, Google Alerts and Google Blog Search, Technorati, and social bookmarking sites.
Yes, it takes a lot of work. And that’s just for the tracking. When you build and maintain these efforts, you get into the marketing. But social media primarily provides us with new tools that help us to implement tried and true marketing techniques. Sites like MySpace and Digg allow for both push (advertising) and pull (conversations). These two primary types of marketing are nothing new. Social media, however, is the new platform for us to explore them.
When these campaigns are engaged, then it’s time to use very analytics, landing pages, promotional codes – all the good stuff from websites and print marketing.
Analytics allows you to track referrals to your site. I’ve shared some analysis on StumbleUpon, for example, which includes how many visitors, their bounce rates, etc.
Landing pages are not just good for paid search, they can be used for social media as well. Try them with your social networks on Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, and Facebook.
Or try setting up promotions. For example, use different codes for MySpace and Facebook friends. Yes, it could travel virally. You want it to travel virally. But you’ll know the success of a given campaign based upon the use of those promo codes.
For the most part, the tricks of the trade that work in traditional marketing, and more familiar types of online marketing (SEO, PPC, email marketing) work in Social Media. Sometimes it doesn’t feel that way because the conversation is a much bigger part of the picture – but don’t let that aspect (which is a wonderful one, btw), throw you off your measurement track.
And that’s how I feel about it!
I, in turn, will tag: Lisa McNeill at Ignite Social Media, Sam Harrelson, and Steven Snell.
Ultimately all marketing has to be tracked by the outcome. So if the object of a linkedin campaign was recruitment it has to be measured by the number of qualifed resumes generated. The issue is that social marketing tends to work in tandem with other more traditional media so it gets harder to figure out just how much of an impact this particular aspect had.
[...] Nathania Johnson tagged me to give my response on the best way to measure social media marketing. [...]
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It’s not really invisible! There’s just different attributes that we’ve not seen before!
I wrote a white paper with Matt Toll of Facetiva Dow Jones on the topic, it’s free for download at
http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2007/08/20/social-media-white-paper-tracking-the-influence-factiva-of-dow-jones/