Hanoi Morillo

If there’s something that defines the Online world is the possibility to measure and track everything. We are all very used to words like clicks, impressions, ctr, cpa…
However, when it comes to social… what do you use?
We can definitely obtain clicks, impressions and other stats, but are those really valuable to determine if your Social efforts are profitable and worthy?

What’s the real value of a user clicking your tweets? Is that user a prospective client for you? Is that user adding value?

Oh wait… stop! I forgot one important thing: should we be talking about ROI when dealing with Social Media? A CEO will definitely say yes! A Social Media expert will probably say… we are not pursuing ROI goals here, we want to engage with our clients in another way…

Well, Social media is not rocket science. It’s not black or white.

Social Media is like any other type of campaign. First thing you do is to set up objectives.

What are you trying to achieve with your social campaigns?
What do you need in order to achieve those goals?
How are you going to measure those campaigns?

When it comes to Social, answering the last 2 questions can be difficult… Is it enough with creating a Facebook Page? Should I have Twitter? What about FourSquare? +1? A blog?
How do I integrate them all?

And the second part… what are the KPIs?
It’s funny because if you search for content about social media measurement, you find a wide variety of metrics you can look at but who is going to tell me if I’m doing right or If I’m missing an opportunity?

Social is not about brand awareness is about brand engagement. What is a good level of engagement? Is having 3 retweets an amazing performance or is it poor? Where are the benchmarks for social media? Well… there aren’t, my friend. The only benchmark is your common sense.

But I have a few tips for you. It doesn’t matter if you’re an individual looking for some Social buzz, a SMB or a big corporation. Just read.

1. Categorize your social efforts by the ultimate goal of each campaign, post, tweet or status update. What do you want?
- Provide with information or updates to your followers?
- Promote a new product/service?
- Get people to buy something?
- To complement a brand awareness campaign?
- Provide with a better customer service?
- Personalize your brand?
etc.

2. How does success look like for you? What would you consider a successful campaign and why?

3. I spy with my little eye: find a similar brand that has been “socially” active for a while. How many replies, i likes, retweets, comments is it getting? Could you use those numbers to build a benchmark and use it as a reference to evaluate your own performance?

4. What’s the level of integration between Social, your other online campaigns and your traditional media? Are they complementing and helping each other?

How are you analysing your social media results?

Article first published as Is Common Sense The Only Real Way to Analyze Social Media? on Technorati.