PR Tools | 7 Ways to Measure the Effectiveness of Social Media
There are many ways to measure the effects of social media. (First, however, you need to start using them.) There is good reason to wonder if you are using it properly, or if it is even worth using for your company; for some companies, social media my not do much. The value social media provides for a company is relative to a few things: the effort they put forth into using social media; their consistency of use; and the target audiences the company establishes.
Here are some ways I measure the effectiveness, results, and the potential lack-there-of with the social media tools I use:
- Traffic. There are a few ways to monitor your site’s traffic, some more reliable than others:
- Analytics. This is a great way to monitor where you traffic is coming from. It can also show how long your visitors stayed, where they went on your site, and if they used a search engine to come to your site. This is a great way to establish if the links you’ve put are generating traffic. I would suggest that every site use analytics; this can especially help to measure if your advertising is effective. A free example (and probably one used most by many websites) is the Google Analytics tool.
- Visitor counters. These can be somewhat tacky, but if you use something like ClustrMaps, this can be a fun way to show your visitors where other visitors are from. This is less reliable than analytics, and really only shows what countries visitors are from. The numbers also differ from Google’s numbers, and only show unique visitors, rather than pageviews, pages/visit, and so on.
The great thing about the above tools is that you can map where visitors are going and the path people take on your blog, what links are clicked the most, and where they go after then come to a landing page. (A landing page is, theoretically, a page that the webpage creator controls and makes especially for a reader who, for instance, read a press release and clicked a link there that took them to a link made especially for them. More often than not, however, landing pages can include pages that are linked from search engine results and other blogs, social networking sites, etc.)
- Social Media Reach and Interaction. This can also be done in a few ways:
- Comments. Though the data overwhelmingly suggests that a large majority of visitors are considered “lurkers” (visitors who do not participate in the online community, blog, or group, but rather lurk the site), your site and blog can still get comments. Your content can also generate comments on other sites from users, like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Digg, Technorati, StumbledUpon, etc. These sites allow users (or yourself) to share your content with other and allows for others to post feedback there. Moreover, if the comments on your blog are generally non-existent, having an increase in them may indicate that your social media efforts are paying off.
- Mentions on social media sites and bookmarks made for your site. This can include Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Digg, Technorati, StumbledUpon, etc. Monitor these sites, and make your content easily shared on them. Add buttons (like the ones in this post) to make it easy for readers to Tweet, update their Facebook, or Digg a post you’ve written. Once you’ve got some great content, connect with others on these platforms, and make it easy to do, the sharing will happen.
- “Lurkers” turned interacting visitors. See what sort of increase there is in reactions, comments, and sharing on the social bookmarking and networking tools mentioned above.
- Profile changes. On Twitter, you can see the number of people following you; on Facebook, the number of “friends”; and on LinkedIn, the number of “Connections” you have. I rarely use Facebook in my professional connections, but Twitter and LinkedIn connections have greatly increased since my blog has become more well known, and I think that only helps to perpetuate its popularity.
- RSS feed subscriptions and newsletter registrations. If you give away a free eBook (like the one in the right hand column), you can choose to utilize a form that gets people to register for your mailing lists, or you can offer a newsletter that comes out every week. The growing numbers can indicate that your social media efforts are paying off.
The above tactics can be used as a measurement of your success at creating useful, valuable content and properly sharing it with the online world. Being at one end of the spectrum (having really great content and not promoting it, or promoting your really terrible content), you are bound to have little success. But, staying in the middle where you have a great balance between awesome content and sharing it online, you are setting yourself up for success. Try to be patient! All of the above take work, and using social media takes effort. Don’t expect great results if you don’t put the work into it.
At a very basic level, you can also measure the effects of social media through sales and prospective customers, though it is very hard to gauge where sales and potential sales come from without asking them, monitoring online sales with analytics, etc. The key is to evaluate the above and see if they help sales; changing one variable at a time can help to pinpoint what efforts are being the most effective.
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