Measuring social media is very big right now. The ways people suggest they're measuring social media don't always stand up to what people typically think of when they think of measurement elsewhere on the web. If you're trying to measure social media, or about to embark on a process to do so, it would behoove you to stop and consider the technique you're applying before you get your answers. Let's examine the three ways to measure social media.
Approach #1: Measure the direct benefits with your analytics package
Measurement Technique: In almost any analytics package, it's trivially easy to see if someone who clicked on a link from twitter or Facebook came to your website and gave money, bought product, etc. This is the most direct form of social media measurement.
Pros: It's really easy to measure with almost any analytics package. People across the organization, even those who don't understand social media, will understand it if you simply compare it to any other venue. For example "You know how we got 25 donations the last time Brad Stone covered our cause in the New York Times Technology section? Well we have a fan page on Facebook and when we unveiled our new product there, we got 25 donations."
Cons: Odds are good that your facebook and twitter work isn't generating numbers comparable to the work you put into the venue. By presenting the straight up results to the uninformed, you may be afraid of giving your social media efforts a bad grade, and someone who wants to cut your budget the ammunition to say "social media is a failure!"
Product vendors at play here: Google Analytics, Omniture SiteCatalyst, WebTrends, etc.
Approach #2: Attempt to assign the overall benefits of the site to people who have interacted with your social media
Measurement Technique: Using a little advanced and/or sneaky technology, you can figure out if visitors to your site who convert in some way (donations, purchases, etc) have visited your Facebook fan page or clicked on one of your tweets. Then,, when they do convert, even if they didn't click right from Facebook or Twitter, you still can attempt to ascribe credit for that donation/sale to social media.
Pros: This can give you some expanded justification for your social media presence and may find many people that validate you by looking at your social media presence, but then go type in your website address and give, which would be otherwise untrackable.
Cons: There are two big ones. First, you're not going to pull this off without significant in-house or vendor technical assistance. Second, just because someone looked at your Facebook or Twitter presence doesn't mean that's where the credit should lie for the donation or sale you got.
This methodology can only demonstrate correlation, not causation. Critics will say "Sure you got a donation from someone who looked at your twitter messages, but how do you know the motivating factor wasn't a piece of direct mail we also sent that drove them online to give? Or perhaps a friend mentioned that they had just donated to us, why aren't you measuring that?"
And they'll have a point. Since you're not measuring the entire media intake of your donors, you'll never really know what motivated them to give.
Product vendors at play here: Tealium + analytics vendors above
Approach #3: Skip actual results, and only measure soft numbers
Measurement Technique: You could just throw your hands in the air and say "Oh to hell with it, I'm just going to measure how many visits I get from twitter and Facebook and how many followers and fans I have". This is typically the most common approach used today, and frankly it drives me bonkers. Non-monetized followers aren't worth anything on their own, though it's good for your ego. (Monetized followers, as demonstrated in the Theory of 1,000 True Fans, however, is worth a good living.)
Pros: Making improvements in this area is very easy, just ask Ashton Kutcher. Anyone, with time on their hands, can amass followers and fans.
Cons: You've actually not accomplished anything that serves the bottom line of the organization yet, and until then, you'll always be at risk of someone cutting your social media budget or asking you to do more work in addition to social media work, since you haven't demonstrated that twitter or Facebook has value yet.
Product vendors at play here: EVERYBODY. Seriously, who doesn't have a product that measures social media? However most of them don't measure much of anything that matters.
What's your recommendation?
Since I don't really enjoy being a curmudgeon let me be clear and say that I think that the answer is to treat your social media work like your email marketing funnel. And by that, I mean a funnel that looks like this:
- Top of funnel: number of followers/fans
- Middle of funnel: number of visits you generate to conversion (sale/donation) pages
- Bottom of funnel: number of conversions (sales/donations)
I can tell you, without even looking at your data, that your start-to-finish conversion rate is probably weaker than any other channel you've got (email or website visits). That being said, this is still a young medium and experimentation here merely costs you content. It isn't as if you have to give the US Postal Service $2,000 every time you want to try another appeal, just craft it and post it online.
What you will need to pull this off is story telling and writing talents. If you don't have those in your organization right now, you need to get them right away. Social Media is a conversational media, and if you're still using the old, broadcast style of communicating your organization's priorities, you're going to get ignored pretty quick.
If you'd like assistance from me in setting up measurement of your social media work, drop me a line at shabbir -at- safdar.net or at 415-683-7526.
Flickr photo from user hannibal1107
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