There are many proven social media monitoring techniques, from simple mention tracking to sophisticated sentiment analysis, to measure the success of your social media marketing efforts. These techniques can be combined with your existing digital campaign analytics to provide insight into how your social media efforts are influencing and augmenting your overall marketing activity.
Typical objectives could include:
Financial ROI:
This is the one your senior team will want to see. As social media marketing tends not to be a lead-generating activity, financial ROI can be hard to measure. It’s not impossible, however.
Olivier Blanchard, author of Social Media ROI, has developed a methodology for measuring the impact of your social marketing initiatives on your bottom line, which is well worth exploring. Increasingly, companies are investigating ways of incorporating SM metrics data into marketing automation solutions such as Eloqua, Marketo or Coremetrics and we see this becoming an ever more prominent topic throughout 2011.
Brand awareness
While monitoring social media mentions alone will not give an idea of sentiment, it can indicate how aware your market is of your brand in relation to the competition. Results can be correlated against recent brand awareness campaigns to determine their effectiveness.
Product/Brand perception:
By combining social media mention monitoring with sentiment analysis, you can analyse the market response to your product news or corporate announcements in real time as well as after the fact.
Trend Reversal
Social media activity can have a positive impact on a downward trend. You will need to clearly define the trend in question, the metrics you will use to establish the point at which it has been reversed, and the tools and timescales you will use to measure progress.
Demand Generation
Tracking social media-generated traffic to your destination sites (e.g. a thought leadership blog post or campaign microsite) or content (e.g. white paper, video or webcast) will show the extent to which your social media activity is creating interest and demand.
Lead Generation
Leads directly generated through your social media activities can be tracked by various methods, including voucher codes, click through analysis or even asking prospects where they heard about your brand/product/offer.