Measuring up social media

Blogs can be a powerful tool when selling your brand or simply engaging consumers and making them part of that brand. The invention and constant reinvention of social media has enabled us to reach a much broader (and diverse audience) through outlets such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace. This week (week 7 of our course at WVU), we learned the importance of taking a few (or more, if you can) steps to evaluate how your site is being marketed via social media vehicles.

Chris Lake of Econsultancy provided some basic tips for measuring the success of your marketing campaign on social media sites.

Incorporating e-mail tags is an easy-to-use tool that will help you gauge feedback and response to your blog. By establishing campaign tags in your Google Analytics (URL tracker) feature, you will be able to track who is opening links from your e-mail or blog. Lake further notes that it is important to set up multiple URL trackers is you are trying to garner more information. For example, you may ask for specific feedback via your e-mail/blog, so you will want to track the number of clicks you get from that specific link. In that e-mail/blog, you may also want to track how many people click on another link about another topic. So, you will want to incorporate a metric for that link as well. In addition to Google, there are a number of programs, including Campaign Monitor and MailChimp, that can help you with e-mail tagging, including

Certainly one of the easiest metrics to establish is via an e-mail subscription. If you are using an e-newsletter that is distributed via a subscription, you can easily measure/evaluate how far your reach has been extended. Lake also talks about followers as a form of metrics for social media. This type of evaluation can be used for blogs, Twitter and Facebook (fans).

All of the tips provided are interesting and certainly worth evaluating for your particular social media uses. But, as with most of the metrics and search engine topics we have discussed during the past three months, setting up some of the tools can be challenging, particularly if you are not familiar with the programs or metrics in general. Certainly identifying your blog followers or Facebook fans is easy to determine. When setting up e-mail campaigns, things get trickier, and you may have to enlist the help of someone who understands the ins and outs of Google Analytics.

Social Media Metrics is an “add on” program recommended by Lake which essentially connects to your Google Analytics to help you measure certain social media vehicles. When trying to add this feature to my Analytics page, I was greeted by a warning (publisher could not be verified), and therefore, I was unable to add this feature to my analytical page.

Our lesson also discussed reorganizing your dashboard and requesting information from sites such as Facebook and Digg, but again, I was left a little dazed and confused on just how to do this. I turned to Ben Parr of Mashable to help shed some light onto the subject. In his article, “How to track social media,” Parr provides various options/information that you can incorporate on your site that will help measure the success (or failure) of your campaign (2009, Parr). In addition to requesting tracking information from sites such as Facebook, he suggests using Bit.ly (a program that helps you shorten your URL and then tracks the information based on that particular link). I found this to be very easy to implement, so Bit.ly is now part of my blog on Blogspot. Bit.ly will track traffic, clicks, traffic sources and the time in which the clicks/visits were made.

Social media continues to be an important component of an overall marketing strategy for any organization. In addition to reaching a bigger audience, social media vehicles are cost-effective in helping to build your brand while engaging customers. As Parr notes, right now there is no place that has all of the information/data you need to measure your social media reach. But, by using the tools available and incorporating some of these steps into your strategy will provide you with an easy (and cheap), way to help reach your audience.


References
Lake, C. (2009). Econsultancy. Retrieved March 6, 2010, from the DMC, SEO, Lesson 7, http://econsultancy.com/

Parr, B. (2009, April 19). How to track social media. Retrieved March 7, 2010, from http://mashable.com/2009/04/19/social-media-analytics/