Social media is regarded as the fastest growing market and a driving force for businesses. Companies have intensified their marketing efforts to improve their social marketing influence and reach more influencers through social media. Marketers are adopting different social networking platforms to promote their websites and brands.
Social networks are leading the Internet. It is widely used for product discovery and decision making. Consumers are inclined to check social networks prior to making purchase decisions. By making use of social media tools, companies are able to interact more with their customers, receive valuable feedback and develop good relationships with their customers than before.
In Internet marketing, a company is as good as the content it makes and the network it shares the content with. Like other marketing forms, social marketing needs to produce Return on Investment (ROI).
In social marketing, ROI could also mean "Return on Influence" or ROE, "Return on Engagement." Returns from social networks are not always measurable by pounds or dollars, but also in consumer behavior corresponding to a social network.
Here are steps to measure your website and brand's social influence:
1. Align Social Marketing With Your Goals
Social marketing is a tool that can be tailored to fulfill your company's needs. It is important that you define your marketing goals before jumping into social marketing. Make sure that your social networking strategy and measurement tools will be aligned with the goals you are trying to achieve.
2. Look Into How Social Media Fits In
The ultimate goal is not to be good at social media marketing, but to be the best website and brand because of your social marketing. Understanding how social media can promote your business and your brand, discovering how your company interacts with its online community and determining the effective online marketing tools is essential in driving your brand's success.
3. Determine Customer Engagement Level
Be aware of the four key motivations that drives customers in using social media - connections, creation, consumption and control - as these play a role in consumer-oriented framework.
Know the extent to which people interact with you and your content, and who your most emotionally-engaged customers are. Find out why they use social media. Their level of interaction shows that they are interested in your brand and what you are offering. Social engagement includes retweets, blog comments, new page "likes" in a Facebook page or content, number of shares, mentions, video views, and a lot more.
By understanding your customer's social behavior and level of social engagement, you can align your business' social media strategy to their own goals.
4. Monitor Your Social Media Network
Look at the community size of your online network, its growth across each platform, as well as the quality and quantity of your social media exposure.
Twitter: Track the number of followers, followers that retweets your message, and the number of instances that your hashtag was used.
Facebook: Track the number of fans in your page. Look into the growth of fans during a certain period or during a promotion to be able to identify your Facebook's monthly reach.
Blog: Track the number of blog visitors and your blog subscribers. Measure the traffic that comes to your site.
YouTube: Track the number of video views, the times that the video was shared, and the number of video subscribers.
5. Use Social Network Monitoring Tools
There are a variety of influence-scoring platforms that assists websites and brands determine their influence and locate influencers in their industry. These tools can help monitor your social media activity to ensure that you're reaching your targets. Most of these tools do the same job of benchmarking, indexing and finding your brand. The idea is to combine and use the ones that excel at finding value from those analytics data. Here are a few tools to get you started:
Klout: This tracks a user's Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Foursquare activity. It takes into account your reach (audience size), network (your influence) and amplification (level of interaction).
Radian6: This tracks a lot of signals and provides insights in to your brands performance on various social media channels. It provides detailed analytics reports and charts for almost all media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and blogs.
Facebook Insights: This provides you with a comprehensive analytics to determine your community's interaction with your Facebook page as well as full insights into your fans.
PeerIndex: This measures your online social capital. It provides a snapshot of what you talk about (topic fingerprint), how many people find what you share valuable (topic resonance) and a comparison of yourself with your network.
There are many other tools worth investigating such as Empire Avenue, Social Mention, PostRank, Twitalyzer, Hootsuite to name but a few.
Measuring the impact of social media is identifying its influence on different social media platforms, its target audience and its business results. The main takeaway here, regardless of how you choose to measure your social engagement, is the success metric. Identify those metrics and integrate them into your analytics processes. Every social media interaction should be tracked and measured. Your business long-term success relies on it.