Measuring Social Media Success
Tuesday- April 01, 2008 Filed in: Social Media | Analytics
I'll be attending Memphis Social Media Breakfast #2 tomorrow and have been asked to talk on measuring social media success. Trying to get a grasp on the current social media landscape and tools available is no easy task, thats why I first believe you must discover what's important to you before you can implement and strategy. A quick overview of my thoughts follow. Let me know what you think and what's important to you.
Your Goals
What your overall marketing goals? Do you want to push sales, drive engagement, increase awareness? What is considered a success? In the end is it the number of people who took an action, products sold, satisfaction index, mainstream media coverage, subscribers/listeners?
Your Tools
● Buzz – See who is talking about you. Go to blog search engine Technorati or get feedback from Google Alerts. Use existing functionality located within your online blogging platforms (WordPress dashboard). Use the old SEO trick by searching for your domain in Google, Yahoo and MSN with the following: link http://www.mysite.com. It’s not an exact science and many of these are very rough numbers, but will serve as a good indicator to see who is talking about and linking to you.
● Content Consumption – Measure who is reading your blog, where they are coming from and what content they are reading. Web analytic reports will show you the most popular content on your site and/or blog. This data will also show you how long they were on that particular page, where they came from, and also the bounce rate. Also consider vanity urls.
● Content Contribution – A quick and easy metric would be to monitor the number of visitors who are actually interacting with your content such as commenting or pinging back to your original post.
● Social Bookmarking – See who is adding your site/article/posts to sites like Del.icio.us, Reddit, Digg and Stumbleupon. Create profiles in each of the bookmarking sites and search for your urls.
● Subscribing to a RSS feed – Measure the number of your readers who are actually subscribing to your RSS feeds. Feedburner gives your readers lots of options to subscribe to your feed with useful stats on the backend
● Emailing posts – Use your blog platform tool like to see how many emails are actually being sent through your form i.e. forward to a friend.
● Profile Engagement - Profiles on Myspace, Facebook, or Mybloglog can give you some of the same metrics mentioned above; as well as monitor the number of friends that you have, total profile visits, etc.
Download this as a PDF
Your Goals
What your overall marketing goals? Do you want to push sales, drive engagement, increase awareness? What is considered a success? In the end is it the number of people who took an action, products sold, satisfaction index, mainstream media coverage, subscribers/listeners?
Your Tools
● Buzz – See who is talking about you. Go to blog search engine Technorati or get feedback from Google Alerts. Use existing functionality located within your online blogging platforms (WordPress dashboard). Use the old SEO trick by searching for your domain in Google, Yahoo and MSN with the following: link http://www.mysite.com. It’s not an exact science and many of these are very rough numbers, but will serve as a good indicator to see who is talking about and linking to you.
● Content Consumption – Measure who is reading your blog, where they are coming from and what content they are reading. Web analytic reports will show you the most popular content on your site and/or blog. This data will also show you how long they were on that particular page, where they came from, and also the bounce rate. Also consider vanity urls.
● Content Contribution – A quick and easy metric would be to monitor the number of visitors who are actually interacting with your content such as commenting or pinging back to your original post.
● Social Bookmarking – See who is adding your site/article/posts to sites like Del.icio.us, Reddit, Digg and Stumbleupon. Create profiles in each of the bookmarking sites and search for your urls.
● Subscribing to a RSS feed – Measure the number of your readers who are actually subscribing to your RSS feeds. Feedburner gives your readers lots of options to subscribe to your feed with useful stats on the backend
● Emailing posts – Use your blog platform tool like to see how many emails are actually being sent through your form i.e. forward to a friend.
● Profile Engagement - Profiles on Myspace, Facebook, or Mybloglog can give you some of the same metrics mentioned above; as well as monitor the number of friends that you have, total profile visits, etc.
Download this as a PDF
