One of the most difficult aspects of pitching social media to leadership is proving its worth in numbers, or, to be frank, cash. Often, this process is frustrating because social-media achievements and positive strides are seemingly unquantifiable. Enter the mythbuster, Jason Falls. Falls, founder of consulting company and blog Social Media Explorer LLC, spoke to this issue at the Social Media Success Summit on Wednesday in his speech, “5 Ways to Measure Social Media Marketing Success.”
His key point? You cannot measure success in social media without developing clear, specific goals and objectives to measure your efforts against.
What can social media do for you and how can you measure it?
- Aid in branding and awareness: Set clear goals to increase your reach and measure using focus groups, surveys or a social-media monitoring/clipping service.
- Build community: Implement a strategy aimed specifically at building community (via Twitter, Facebook Fans, e-mail lists, etc.) and compare your growth and conversions before and after.
- Provide customer service: Monitor for a change in public sentiment, better customer survey results and reduced call-center costs after you implement your strategy.
- Allow for research, development and collaboration: Use your community as a market research team — allow them to tell you how to improve your products and services and give you ideas for new ones. A great example? Dell Idea Storm.
- Offer direct sales opportunities: Use Web analytics software to measure traffic and conversion from your social-media channels (Facebook, Twitter, blogs) to your website for purchases of products or services that provide direct revenue to your company.
For more great sessions on how to develop a social-media strategy and maximize your efforts, check out the continuing 100% online Social Media Success Summit that (full disclosure) SmartBrief helped plan. For access to the whole session and many others, sign up here.
Image credit, www.JasonFalls.com