This guest post is by Beth Ludwick, manager of member communications at the Grocery Manufacturers Association. Beth collaborates with us daily in the production of GMA SmartBrief, and provided us with her first post on social media in the CPG space just last week.
Almost every week I see at least one news article about how consumer packaged goods companies are increasing their spend online, particularly in video. When GMA set out to conduct an informal survey on social media with our members, I was not surprised to see that of the 22 companies surveyed, 63.6 percent of respondents are shifting resources from traditional to social media.
What was surprising in the survey findings released at the Dec. 10 GMA CPG Social Media Forum is that more than 50% of respondents are not monitoring consumer-generated content about their brand or tracking social media activity.
Of those who are, the majority are using proprietary measurement tools from private vendors. Fans, followers, sentiment, comments, clicks, engagements and interactions are just some of the metrics as being tracked, however answers varied greatly, which is important to note because companies should be measuring what is important to them — one size does not fit all.
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Monitoring what is being said about your brand is one of the crucial first steps when entering social media. During the forum, the majority of speakers advised CPG companies who are new to social media to begin by listening to what consumers are saying online because that data is the key to creating an effective social media strategy for the company. Without that data, the allocation of resources is a shot in the dark.
More presentations from the CPG Social Media Forum, including the GMA Survey Findings can be found here.