Soci@lByte

From the desk of Elaine Schoch…

I used to work in-house handling the PR and marcom for an online company. Every week I was asked to “measure” the effectiveness of the program, similar to how you measure pay-per-click ads and other SEM activities. It was maddening. I was old-school PR in an age when SEO was new and few PR people were doing it, let alone even knew what SEO was. But with the help of some SEO wizards and super smart data crunchers, I was able to find a way that made everyone happy. I learned a lot about measurement and how to measure PR in an online world. So, it was crazy to me to read a recent report on eMarketer.com – Social Media Measurement Lags Adoption – that stated only 16 percent of marketers are measuring social media.

Eight-six percent of the respondents to the survey (from a variety of industries) said they had adopted social technologies yet only 16 percent were measuring its success.

I suppose it’s not that surprising given that the Aberdeen benchmark report Social Media Marketing: The Latest Buzz on Word of Mouth, found that more than one-third (34%) of all companies indicated that a primary reason that they don’t currently engage in social media marketing activities is because they lack suitable performance metrics for evaluating the results.

I know measurement is difficult – it always has been for the PR industry and with social media it’s even harder, especially for agencies since most don’t have access to internal web analytics and other metrics. Another challenge with measuring the ROI for social media is that you are trying to put numeric quantities around engagement with real people having real conversations, which is not quantifiable. However, if businesses don’t adopt ways to effectively measure the ROI of social media then this medium will be something they can easily dismiss.

While you can’t put metrics around engagement, there are metrics related to social media that are trackable. You first have to determine what metrics are important and what metrics – realistically – you can get (if you work for an agency you may have to depend on your client for some metrics). Here is a short list of a few common metrics that can help measure the ROI of social media campaigns you’re implementing…

Common Metrics to Measure Social Media

• Increases in customer engagement: click-throughs, opt-ins, content downloads, registrations, time spent on the website, page views
• Improvement in Google/Yahoo! search rankings
• Ecommerce: overall, jumps around specific social media pushes, sales from people coming in through social channels
• Blogs: Comments left on your blog, subscribers, time spent reading posts, etc.
• Twitter: Increase in followers, RT’s, @, DM, links back to the site via URLs tweeted
• Facebook: Increase in fans, comments, fan photos, links back to the site via Facebooks posts

Are there other ways you’re measuring ROI for social media? Please share…