Measuring Social Media, does it give competitive advantage?

No doubt that everybody doing any marketing activity, want to see if it is successful and want to document the success. The documentation is not only for one self but also for the c-level in your company.  Using time and energy measuring the Social Media, one can ask does it give your company any competitive advantage?

Numerous reports, discuss the topic measurement of Social Media and there are many angles how to do the measuring. One thing is certain do not engage in Social Media if it is not a part of your marketing strategy. Do not engage if you do not have a plan for how to get a competitive advantage out of the use of social media.  With the advance technology we have today, it has never been easier to engage in Social media.  With the easy access to Social media, you need to ask yourself some important questions before you will be able to get the full benefit of the competitive advantage:

• What part of your company will be able to use the competitive information you can gain from Social Media?
• What is the timeframe for using the competitive information?
• How will the competitive information affect your company choices?
• How willing would you be to change your company plans if the competitive information show you that your plans will change to negative?

If you find a positive answer to the above questions, you should take the next step. You need to start using your social media for competitive intelligence. You should start listening and engaging in the dialog about your own brand, and competitors brand. It is vital in this competitive world we are living in, to know and analyse what costumers say about your brand but even more vital what costumers say about your competitors brand. To go out there and collect the competitive intelligence you need to at least three areas of your competitors:

• Collect Information from your competitors and their costumers
• Marketing initiatives from competitors
• Product announcing from competitors
• Costumers interactions
• Analyse the competitive information
• Share of voice
• Share of conversation
• Trend analysis
• Build your business decisions on the above intelligence
• Base your decisions on the data above.
• Do not over react on the facts evaluate them and alter your planning if needed but in the end stick to your plan as long as it is sustainable.

You have metric for the above and even free metrics as Google analytics.

When you start to gathering intelligence on your competitors, you should be aware that your competitors are gathering intelligence on you. Be aware in you social media presence to have a footprint which do not damage your business but will help you expand your business even though that your competitors will learn from you but you will still have the competitive advantage.

How to measure the success of Social Media

There is a growing demand of measuring everything so the enterprise can see where to spend the marketing resources on the best possible way. Social Media is not an exception from this and should not be an exception. The importance in the measuring and monitoring of Social Media is not just measure something but measure the right thing according to the business objectives set for the social media campaign. What is important is to measure the success and you can’t do that without having the proper business objectives and goals set.

Choose Measurement tools for tracking

Having formulated the business objectives and goals in a clear way, you want to measure your goals and tactics you want to use your analytic tools to do the tracking. Before you choose one of the many tools, you need to learn how to measure your progress. My advise, choose one of the free platforms first. A good and easy tool to choose is Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a free platform, which gives you the ability to build exactly the report you want, showing only which information you need, presented directly to stakeholders and clients in a neat package.  By using Google Analytics you will be able to capture the KPI (key performance indicators) from your Social Media campaign such as;

• Traffic – Quality and Quantity
• Engagement level
• Goal conversations
• E-Commerce direct sales
• Cost savings by comparing Social Media with other marketing channels

With enablement in place, you can start using the tagging in Google Analytics and fine tune them according to your campaign, because your goal of the effort is to be able to demonstrate ROI.

Do we have fully developed measuring and tracking tools?

A challenge is to use and find proper tracking tools created, to engage your audience. I am talking about content and channel metrics. There is no doubt that content and channel metrics, will be more developed in the years to come, and they will be even better in engaging with the audiences that are on the content-providers web. According to Marshall Sponder (2011, Social Media Analytics) there are a number of online content analytics tagging tools that can measure audiences behaviour on content. You want to track your progress so you can get management to support your further progress. To get into the stage of further progress you have to share your knowledge with management and key influencers that is why you need to know if you can find other tools than Google analytics, which visualize how social your costumers will get. Newspapers uses a tool called VisualRevenue this tool uses real-time analytics to evaluate profitability on front page and section page in the paper. There are many more of these new social media measurement systems to come.