I Was Told There Would Be No Math

You’ve met with your client, researched your audience, setup tools for listening and monitoring, and created a social media plan. You’re off and running with new updates and engaging content. Now what?

You could sit back and, to quote 50 Cent, “watch the money pile up,” but it’s not your birthday so that’s probably not your best bet. You could say, “Social media is all about conversation — you can’t measure that.” But clients and managers looking out for the bottom-line aren’t going to respond well to your fuzzy claims.

Flickr photo from Vindaloo

Sooner or later, you have to face the numbers.

Before you get ahead of yourself with the plethora of shiny new tools available for analyzing data and tracking metrics, stop and ask yourself one question: what exactly are you measuring?

You won’t answer this question by tracking Google alerts or reading WordPress statistics. In order to develop a successful plan for social media measurement, you need to go back to square one and answer the question: what are your goals and objectives?

A goal to increase sales is much different than a goal to build community, and each goal will need different tools for measurement. Depending on the specific goals and objectives outlined in your plan, you’ll need to use a mixture of quantitative and qualitative metrics to effectively measure your social media marketing efforts. That’s right, not only are numbers essential, but you need to get a handle on effectively assessing the “fuzzy” qualitative data too.

Once you’ve identified your goals and objectives, what you’re measuring will most likely come down to four outcomes outlined by Metrics Man:

1. EXPOSURE — “to what degree have we created exposure to content and message?”
2. ENGAGEMENT — “who, how, and where are people interacting/engaging with our content?”
3. INFLUENCE — “the degree to which exposure and engagement have influenced perceptions and attitudes.”
4. ACTION — “as a result of the PR/social media effort, what actions if any has the target taken?”

Knowing the outcomes you want to measure will make it easier to find the right tools. For example, if you want to track exposure, you can use tools like Google Analytics for tracking SEO rankings. Edelman VP Michael Brito has a great post about measuring standard ‘engagement’ metrics. Measuring influence will vary depending on how you define it, and may involve reach and online influencers. Finally, tracking actions taken as a result of your social media efforts is a way to determine your return on investment (ROI). If you want to learn more about ROI, one of the most popular (and most debated) topics in social media measurement, you can get started with this post from Social Media Explorer.

Selecting measurement tools with your goals, objectives, and outcomes in mind will not only enable you to collect the right data, it will also be a huge time-saver when you get down to the business of analyzing it. After all, what good is data if you don’t know what to do with it?

Angela Seits is graduate student studying public relations at the University of Oregon. You can follow her on Twitter @aseits or connect on LinkedIn.

Flickr photo from Vindaloo

Tagged analytics, metrics, planning, ROI, social media measurement