Quick Tips for Effectively Measuring Social Media Campaigns
Leave a comment I’m currently working on a campaign that combines a variety of Social Media platforms (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr) as well as a microsite. As you might imagine or may have experienced yourself, gathering all of useful metrics from these sources are like hearding cats.
Here are a few tips that might help in measuring your cross-platform campaigns:
Tag Everything!
If you’re posting links to Twitter via a URL shortening service (my favorite is tr.im since it’s the shortest) embed a tracking parameter with the original URL. For example, if you’re going to shorten www.somewebsitewithalongurl.com, add a parameter to the end to identify what source it came from and then shorten the URL. That way, the source can be pulled from the parameter rather than having to rely on sometimes unreliable referrer reports.
Even if you’re not Tweeting, this is a good way to link from blogs, Facebook, forums, etc.
Track Your Videos
On my current campaign, we initially rolled out videos that were around two minutes long. By adding video tracking (using Omniture’s new media tracking capabilities), we were able to determine that people are willing to watch around one minute. Shorter videos made for better watched videos which also greatly increased the willingness of viewers to watch more videos and forward links to our videos.
YouTube and Facebook also provide metrics around audience engagement and demographics. Be sure to use these and not just the number of views.
Followers, Friends and Fans
At the beginning of the campaign, be sure to baseline the number of Twitter followers, Facebook/MySpace (there, I said it in case you were wondering) Friends, and Facebook fanpage fans. Assuming you’re actively promoting through these platforms, you’ll be able to trend your growth through the duration of the campaign.
Many out there seem to believe that these numbers are the most important things to track… not so! Monitoring the conversation, retweets, and context is extremely important. While this may be tough without some advanced analytics tools, it is definitely do-able with a little hardwork. In my opinion, it’s key to watch who is the most communicative (positive and negative), who passes on your message (retweets, posts…) so you can identify brand fans/ambassadors, and what content draws the most reaction and interaction.
Read Referrer Reports
Even if their reliability may not be 100%, most referrer reports do a pretty good job at telling you where site traffic is coming from. It’s useful to figure out not just which sites, but what type of sites are promoting your campaign. An often overlooked piece of information contained in these reports are for webmail. Considering the reported clients as a sample, you can deduce from the report how often you campaign was forwarded around by people viewing it.
Hopefully these quick tips help out in your campaigns. As always, I welcome any further questions, comments or feedback.
View this post – “Quick Tips for Effectively Measuring Social Media Campaigns” on Greg’s blog.
I was just thinking about this today myself and it is important to not only measure the above, but remind analysts to measure this against the investment/expense of the social media campaign. Maybe that is an underlying given to some, but not to many. A campaign might look successful on the surface level, but what did it cost your business ($$, time spent on implementing/follow-up/analysis)? This gets you much closer to a realistic ROI.