Say your business runs a marketing campaign and you want to measure how much it increased your revenue. The problem is, so many other things happened at the same time that you can’t be sure whether your performance was driven by social media or whether it was driven by other things.
Until Google Glass (or some other futuristic augmented reality product) records everything we see and sends that information back to Google Analytics so that offline purchases can be tracked seamlessly, there is simply no way to perfectly measure social media return on investment. Even tracking online purchases has its limits and these are exacerbated on social media. Perhaps more importantly, businesses don’t know how to measure how social media outreach affects their brand. Fortunately, this measurement is quantifiable if you use the right social media monitoring tools correctly. Here’s how social media monitoring tools can aid your business:
- Analyze customer sentiment. I expect most people on SmartBlog on Social Media to know this already — but it needs to be said regardless. Social media monitoring tools use advanced algorithms to analyze the language used in each and every social media comment about your brand or your product. They present this data in sheets and charts and divide comments into “positive” and “negative” so that you can accurately measure the success of your branding and public relations campaigns. Or, if you have a PR fiasco, you can see how people are reacting to it so that you can clean it up as effectively as possible.
- Learn where people are talking about you. For all the talk about sentiment analysis, you need to know whether people are talking about you on Twitter, Facebook, blogs, Google+ or some other channel. You might find that almost all of the conversation is on Twitter, which makes a Twitter outreach campaign much more fruitful than a Facebook one. But remember that Twitter is less engaging than Facebook, so one bad Facebook comment counts a lot heavier than one Twitter tweet.
- Proactively create positive sentiment. Don’t lose control of your brand just because you can’t control what everyone says on social media. Talk about your traditional PR efforts on social media just like you would in the newspapers. If you sponsor a graffiti cleanup, tweet about it even though it won’t produce many immediate sales. Respond when people tweet you back and build engagement with them. Social media is as much PR as it is marketing, so use it to actively build up your reputation.
Want to dive deeper into the world of social media for business? This post was adapted from the white paper “Learn Social Media Monitoring in Fifteen Minutes,” by Murray Newlands. Download the white paper for free!