9 Specific Ways to Measure a Social Media Campaign
NOVEMBER 30, 2009:
Brian Haugen, Interactive Marketing Strategist
Social Media Guest Blogger Results Targeting
The Business.com 2009 Social Media Benchmarking Study surveyed over 4,000 social media marketers to analyze the social media trends taking place in today’s businesses. One piece of information from this study stood out to me. It asked respondents whether they used any of nine methods for judging success of their social media initiatives.
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Web site traffic
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Engagement with prospects
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Brand awareness
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Engagement with customers
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Revenue
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Brand reputation
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Prospect lead volume
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Prospect lead quality
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Useful product feedback
I’ve listed them here in order of highest to lowest ranking. They ranged from about 60 percent down to about 20 percent. Examining this list further, I came to a couple conclusions.
1. Notice how lead generation was pushed onto the backburner? This is a far cry from the mantra of other popular online marketing activities, such as search engine optimization or email marketing, where the main reason you would try it is because it’s so measurable down the sales funnel. I wonder how this list would be ranked if it were regarding either of those types of campaigns.
2. I found it surprising that the most popular method for judging success of a social media campaign was website traffic. Doesn’t this go against some of the main benefits of social channels – mainly, that marketers can now engage with prospects and customers where they are, instead of trying to entice them onto their own corporate site? At least engagement with prospects and customers were ranked second and fourth, respectively.
Overall, I found this study really useful in terms of providing a quick glimpse into what businesses are doing with their social media forays. There are also a bunch of great lists of resources in the report, such as popular question and answer sites or top tools that marketers are using to monitor their brands.
This blog post was originally published on the Priority Blog at priorityresults.com/blog. Priority Integrated Marketing is now BlueSpire Strategic Marketing.