Social Media Metrics: Measuring your Campaign

For years the baleful consensus has been that social media cannot make you money directly, with some notable exceptions. While social media is brilliant at getting a company's brand seen, and to perform some level of customer service and public relations, people aren't always interested in completing a sale right then and there because they didn't go to Twitter or Facebook at that moment to necessarily look for something to buy. This does happen with search, where people often perform a specific search for something they want or need. It happens in email marketing, where people are made aware of products that they do want, because they come from the company they like enough they joined their email program.

This is all mainly true, if terribly oversimplified. Therefore the real problem becomes how you go about measuring success if not through direct ROI? 

Answer: By measuring everything else.

The purpose of social media for a company should be to create enough public interest that people perform searches for the brand later in the cycle. Say a user has never thought about a marshmallow gun before. Then Skymall posts a link on Twitter to their marshmallow gun in their catalog. The user might look and laugh, and think nothing of it... until someone mentions needing a party gift, and the marshmallow gun occurs to them. They perform a search, find the marshmallow gun, complete a sale. That sale can't easily be connected to the Twitter post, especially if the sale happens months down the road. 

Also, referral traffic would go up not because of the links laid down in social sites, but because someone saw that link, spread it around themselves, and traffic came in because of the wide proliferation of that link. 

So the best way available to measure the success of your campaign is to look at what you can look at, namely

• Number of views/comments of specific conversations
• Referral traffic from the social site in question

This will get you good information on the specific post's penetration. If you know your Twitter post has been re-tweeted 20 times, you know it has legs. If it has sent 500 visits to your page, it has generated a lot of interest. If none of this converts into a sale, don't fret - instead, look at your metrics for traffic from other sources. Did the number of searches go up for you or the product you posted about? Perhaps you had more newsletter sign-ups, inferring that people weren't ready to buy right then and there, but were interested in keeping up with your other offers? 

It is a lie to say that social media is beyond metrics. This was said more often in 2006 or 2007, when the concepts were in their infancy. Now we understand not only how to measure the benefit and success of social media, we know to not interpret it the same way we do for search or direct traffic or from media placements. It needs to be looked at as an element in your larger marketing campaign. This is pure sales process engineering.

It is also a mistake to think that users of social media are not good consumers, because they don't sign out of Facebook to go buy a product because they saw someone's wall post about it. In fact, they are good consumers, you just aren't catching them at the moment they are ready to buy when they are on social media sites. Instead, they are ready to listen. If what you say and how you say it is engaging enough, they will listen. A number of them visit you again, maybe weeks or months or years down the road, but they will come. 

It's all a matter of not only understading what your customer wants, but that they don't always want it at the time you think they do.

About the Author: Eric Reid

I am the Social Media Services Manager for Off Madison Ave. I've been with the company since 2006, when I was hired to do SEO, and link building in particular. When social networking sites started cropping up, at first I started using them to create backlinks - but they weren't the best for that, given all of the "nofollow" attributes. However, I did see the potential for all of the direct referral traffic they represent. Since then I've been actively pursuing both tactics for clients: Links that can help them for search, and social postings that get them involved in the conversation. It's about the coolest job you could ever get. ;)

View more blog posts from Eric Reid >

Contact Eric

<< back to blog