Measuring Social Media Success

By Stephanie Jordan
in

While social media as a messaging medium has become a mainstay, e-marketers are still learning how best to incorporate this latest channel into marketing practices and to define what success looks like. The E-tailing Group offered a synopsis of its recent Annual Merchant Survey in its whitepaper Metrics Therapy—Details, Dashboards and Diligence authored by E-tailing Group President Lauren Freedman and sponsored by Baynote. The section on social media success was of particular interest.

The survey included responses of 147 merchants and how they are thinking of metrics today and how those metrics are used to drive business decisions. The no-brainer metric is the number of Facebook fans or Twitter followers. But according to the findings, retailers are looking for ways to measure social beyond engagement. There are other metrics being used like click-through rates to retail site from social media, growth rate year-over-year for pre-determined KPIs, number of YouTube views, sales from social networks, improved SEO, PR and media exposure, and video sharing rates.

“Interactivity seemed to be of greater interest for retailers to clarify how wide a net was being cast in the social stratosphere,” writes Freedman. “This moved beyond the number of fans to the levels of conversation and how much they were promoted and shared. Interest in growing social as a communication tool means monitoring the conversations and jumping in to bolster activity.”

Another merchant advocated not counting the number of fans, but rather count the number of comments on posts, returning views and overall time spent using the social media channel.

Freedman also notes that, “More sophisticated players are attempting to track the cost to acquire a new fan and understand where and when they convert in order to put necessary social resources in place.” Another metric to consider: tracking who is signing up for emails from social locations and tracking subsequent engagement with the company.

Additional areas Freedman says to pay attention to:

  • Referral sources (blogs, Facebook, Twitter)
  • Where traffic is derived from
  • General onsite sharing tools (share, like)

When considering what is successful with e-marketing today, it is not just about transactions anymore. Interactions with the company and building relationships is the real value social media can bring, at a relatively low cost. This is true for B2C markets, but also holds true for B2B.

Published April 30, 2012