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.