Measuring the success of social media efforts can be automated to a certain extent, but also needs human analysis to really be able to assess the tone and brand positioning across the various targeted social media platforms. There is no industry standard for measurement and ROI but the introduction of standardized measurement by UKOM in the UK may lead to better benchmarks.
Before a campaign starts its goals need to be properly understood:
If the goal is qualitative then we consider the campaign a success if we have been successful in building better relationships with our key audiences, have been able to participate in conversations where we previously lacked a voice, and if we were able to engage in a meaningful dialogue with our customers.
If the goals are quantitative then assessing the results can be more automated as we can use analytics to measure traffic, Feedburner to measure the reach of our feeds and podcasts, YouTube to determine how successful our videos have been, Facebook to determine the popularity of our apps, Delicious and other bookmarking sites to measure the popularity of our content, and work with the various search engines to see how much we are mentioned and linked to, and to see if our rankings have improved.
It is important to measure sentiment before, during, and after campaigns, this can be somewhat automated with a tool such as BuzzMetrics. Measuring constantly during the campaign allows us to react quickly to counter a negative reaction or enhance a positive one, maximizing opportunities and driving strategy.
Tags: Digital Advertising, Social Media