Guest comment: Social media: why it can and should be measured

According to a recent Forrester Report: “…owned social media assets (like internal blogs, community sites) are really the only emerging media getting traction in today's economic climate.” As the report points out, advertising budgets are in decline, with more of the limited budget being put into online advertising. But overall, there’s less money to achieve overall marketing targets.

We know more and more brands are investing in social media. But how do you measure the return on that investment? Everywhere you look somebody’s asking: what can you measure, what do the metrics mean, what’s the ROI? Of course you can measure the impact of social media. The harder question is what you measure it against.

Social media strategies should start with a business strategy and an audience strategy. What you measure depends on what you want to achieve. If you want, like eircom has done, to engage with customers and provide customer services (in eircom’s case through an owned community, eircom connect), then you can measure the levels of engagement, feedback and the time saving on your customer service team.  But if you want to use social media as a sales channel, take a leaf out of Dell’s (net)book. Its main Twitter account now has more than 1.5 million followers, and Dell has made more than $6.5 million in orders for PCs, software and accessories from promotions sent via tweets.

If you want to track action or engagement, then there are any number of tools you can use. Websites such as SocialMention and SocialToo can give you a basic indication of your brands social media status. URL shorteners such as bit.ly and owl.ly can track the number of click throughs that your individual social media messages generate. On Twitter, there are tools like: Twitter Analyser, which provides information on the reach and number of retweets (RTs);  BackTweets, which allows you to search tweets in which people have linked to you but not referenced you by name; and Trendistic, which lets you track mentions of keywords.

But social media is greater than the sum of its parts. What none of these tools do is provide insight into what’s really working, or recommendations for future strategy that will help you achieve real value from social media campaigns.

The thing about social media is this: your brand is being talked about online, and your reputation is being influenced, with or without your input. So the question is less ‘what’s the ROI’ and more ‘what’s the risk if I don’t get involved’. Your customers are talking about you – the good and bad stuff – and those conversations are there for all to see. Remember, too, that when a potential customer searches for your company online they’ll see what people have said on social networks and blogs, which may then impact their purchasing decisions.

Scary stuff. So the most important thing you can track is your reputation – what are the good things, and the bad things that people are saying. A good reputation makes a company; a bad one breaks it. Social media allows you to measure whether the buzz about your business is good or bad, and what impact a shift in reputation has on sales. In other words: what’s your social media reputation?

Social media doesn’t just let you measure its own impact, it lets you measure the impact of all your other marketing, too. By tracking changes in your social media reputation (SMR) – through a combination of automated and the all-important human analysis -  you can track the impact of an ad campaign, a viral marketing campaign, a PR campaign and your social media campaign. You can see whether consumers like your new product. What they hate about your shop front. What service they’re desperate to see. The things you’d never have known if you didn’t talk to them. You can take this feedback, and use it to create new campaigns that will engage them, or even develop products they want (like Starbucks does with mystarbucksidea). Campaigns that boost the bottom line (measurable enough?).

That’s the ROI of social media. Why wouldn’t you get involved?

Steve Richards is MD of specialist social media agency, Yomego: www.yomego.com. He has published a guide to measuring the ROI of social media, which can be downloaded here.

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