This was a presentation I gave at the Vermont Web Summit on November 3, 2011. It's mostly about choosing something smart to measure, like real business stuff, than the nuts and bolts of social analytics.
14. What Are These Metrics Worth?
Numbers to consider:
Social media marketers reported that
48% of their budgets are used to attract
new members to their pages.
From e-Marketer study, September 2011
15. What Are These Metrics Worth?
Numbers to consider:
Social media marketers reported that
48% of their budgets are used to attract
new members to their pages.
52% said their fan or follower base
was not target-appropriate.
From e-Marketer study, September 2011
16. How have all of those METRICS
helped your BUSINESS?
17. Numbers to think about:
Increasing your customer satisfaction by 5%
can increase profits by as much as 95%
18. Social Strategy & Metrics: Sales
Use your social channels to increase sales
20. Measure
1. How many items sold
2. How many people clicked on your offer
(conversion rate)
3. How much the promotion cost
4. Increase in sales in general
23. Measure: Increase Customer Satisfaction
1. Requests through social
2. # of resolved issues
3. How long does it take to resolve
4. Do customers tell others
5. Satisfaction (ask!)
29. Listening Metrics
Gather the top 3-4 ideas per month from
your customers.
Identify the top 2-3 influencers each
month. Treat them specially.
30. Strategy: Drive Web Traffic
Use your social channels to increase
traffic to your Web site (where you do
business).
31. Integrate Social Apps
ABCNews.com, Washington Post and The
Huffington Post are said to have more than
doubled their referral traffic from Facebook
since adding social plugins.
32. Integrate Social Apps
American Eagle added the Like button next to
every product on their site and found
Facebook referred visitors spent an average
of 57% more money than non-Facebook
referred visitors
It’s kind of a made up term. The challenge is that many of the metrics are made up too.
Social media metrics are only interesting or important, if they can show you where you’re being successful and where you’re not being successful.Social media metrics should be less about numbers, and more about interpretations. But usually they’re not. Why
Most companies can’t really answer this question. To be honest, most companies social strategy is “Starting a Facebook page” Question: What’s the metric for that? I guess if it exists, then your metric is success? But it doesn’t mean much.You can choose to go left or right. You can choose to go up or down. But unless you choose to move, your metric, your measurement may be as unimportant as your direction.
This is the social strategy of most companies. Manage and grow is another variation. But just like domesticated plants, you need a lot of fertilizer and irrigation to grow. Where is that coming from? Weeds are really successful at this strategy.Note – there are some very good plant strategies if you really dug into it. Like getting people to eat your fruit so they spread your seeds.Or trying to block out the competition. Or, like orchids, designing your flowers so they fit the beaks of hummingbirds.Those are competitive strategies and good ones for business. But they’re different than planting a pumpkin patch.
Establish and Grow uses very simplistic metrics, available to everyone. These metrics are primarily quantitative rather than qualitative. They describe growth.
You can track growth over time, to show progress. You can do this manually or with tools. The idea here is to count everything that you can.Some of this start measuring what people are doing once they see your content. We usually refer to these as Engagement MetricsIf you’re using these to measure engagement, question: what is the value of that engagement? If you have 50,000 facebook fans, and you ask them what their favorite color is, let’s hopeyour brand is Pantone. Otherwise, what good doesitreally do?
Luckily there are tools out there that count and track your numbers for you. Some are free, others paid. Some of the metrics, over time, show your growth, or trends. They look really good, so you can use them in reporting.Twenty Feet tracks most of these basic numbers and its free. Crowdbooster, also free, tracks many of these numbers, but tells you best times to post contentSimply Measured, lets you download lists and data of your followersKlout gives you an influence number shows your reach and people you impact
Tap 11 costs but has nicer graphsTwitalyzer has metrics like generosity influence and velocity! Oh boy
Facebook’s new insights page tries to show expanding circles of influence as it tries to quantify the effect your Fans have on their environment Friends of Fans, People talking about this.
The challenge of GROWTH metrics
Spending money on things that don’t work. What’s a metric for that?How would you measure whether your fan base is appropriate or not? How could you pre-qualify your GROWTH budget to make that more relevant?
How have they helped make you the best?
Closer
Exact Target study from last month. What are the top issues people look for on Facebook pages? Sorry, you’re not Sally Field, they don’t really, really like you.
For those of you in the service industry who are sitting there thinking that you don’t offer sales or discounts (any lawyers out there for instance), remember that most people still wanted EXCLUSIVE things. You can offer that, both online and offline. Think about it. What special treats or events could you envision for your customers? How could you put that up on social media and track that?
We’re marketers; we’re not supposed to do that. Most CMOs say they’re not equipped for ROI discussions.
Again for the service people, this doesn’t have to be product focused. We’re seeing a number of professions, like therapists, starting to move their business online. Anyway you can make it easier to connect with real people to start answering their questions (even if the resolution happens on the phone), you win and your customers win. You just have to imagine ways to do it.
Can you improve customer service through social media? But you have to prepare for it. No difference than integrating Chat into your site. It’s the same thing.Reduce the response time by 60x
Thar’s gold in them thar hills. Can you use your social customers to make what you do better? To Listen and Learn?
Logo debacle like the Gap. You can use this for lots of things, including product development!
You can get lots of data around your social accounts, including comments with keyword focus. One interesting one here is AddictoMatic, where you enter in a word and it creates an aggregation of social sources talking about your term. If, for nothing else, that would be great for you to share with the marekting team (its free, too). One huge challenge with all of these tools is the overwhelming amounts of data and junk data. Metrics become much less interesting, since a lot of the quantiative numbers may not be relevant. Brand info gets mixed in with company financial info, for instance. You almost need a big team to use some of these.
Recruit Brand Ambassadors – the best way is to notice who talks about you and how, and what their reach is. Many brands are already doing that, that would be a good metric.Mention Map shows who’s talking about you. Wordle gives you a Word Cloud of most common terms your audience talks about. Its an easy way to get a quick overview. Backtype and social mention do a lot of what Twitter searches or even a monitoring service will do, but both are free.
Tell the Trapp Family story. Created and listened. Not about numbers, but about intelligence. We used that to develop a product/promotion targeted at first time visitors. Went right to the bottom line. And they’re still doing it 2 years later.
Measure how integrating them into the business increases performance. Ask people for helpStart of an ambassador program. Practice random acts of social! Watch what happens
For some clients, Facebook is now the third largest driver of traffic, after direct and Google organic. Because we’ve built it to share relevant content with a specific audience.
For publishers – remember, they’re selling iballs. Their traffic has a direct correlation with how much money they can make on advertising, which is what keeps them afloat. Traffic=money.
Ah, now we can start talking about how much a like is worth. Actually 57% percent more than a non-like. That’s good money. And it also opens up lots of ideas for how to talk with that audience. SMART.
Again, Facebook’s new tools, use them to understand how your social apps and integration are impacting the business.
You can make inferences. This is how TV advertising has always worked. We think in digital we have to be so precise, but we don’t.
We may not be able to make a concrete cause and effect, but we need to put our metrics into perspective.
Note: NOT USED IN PENNSYLVANIA They measure fish in a different way there
Learn, learn, learn. Don’t get too focused on data. Metrics is measuring results.
The numbers themselves aren’t important. It’s how you translate them and provide insight and judgement that’s critical. VALUE!