Henshaw

This week I was struck by a social media marketer’s response to measuring ROI on social media – it shouldn’t be done if it is a part of a larger campaign….seriously?!

 Social media, just like any other media tactic must be measured. There are a multitude of reasons for this – measuring effectiveness and developing credibility for internal audiences are just two examples. In addition social media channels can be used as a call to action which supports traditional media campaigns, and of course it can be used to meauere the success of a campaign that has an exclusive social media focus.

There are a number of questions to consider when looking at which metrics to use:

• What are your objectives?
• What metrics will help us to determine our progress towards that objective?
• Is the metric prone to manipulation, is it reliable, is it precise?
• How frequently to we need to measure? How often does it take to collect the data? How much does it cost?

Now these questions look very much like traditional forms of media measurement. That’s where the differences come in.

From a channel selection perspective social media offers a multitude of metrics which support the measurement of specific objectives, these could include:

Monitoring company reputation:

• Mentions
• Tone
• Number of negative posts

Measuring the success of a promotion:

• Number of unique page views
• Trackbacks
• Number of comments/likes/bookmarks/digs
• Responses/retweets

Community growth:

• Number of groups/group members
• Active creators/contributors
• Number of connections 

This list includes a combination of attitudinal (reputation and community) and transactional (measuring a promotion) buckets. These two categories could compliment each other nicely if they are used in coordination – positive reputation and strong communities can drive transactions.