MediaBUZZ - ePublisher of Asian eMarketing

Social Media Marketers are often drowning in a sea of figures and the monitoring of their social media activities can therefore becoming quite a burden for many. Each social network, each monitoring tool provides its own metrics and there are hundreds of ways to measure the success of social media activities. With such an enormous variety of possible indicators and at the same time very low input and insight, clarifying which figures are important or not, it is no surprise that marketers are often overstrained with the monitoring of their social media activities.

Forrester Research has developed a simple 3-step strategy to facilitate the measurement of social media activities, you can consider following in order to end the chaos in your marketing reports and to measure in the future more effectively:

(1) Think about your marketing

Go theoretically back and look for your notes you have made during the planning of your social media activities. Remember your goals you wanted to pursue. If you do not know what your goals has been, you will neither know what should be measured, nor if and when you will get there.

(2) Think about which indicators are signaling success

Don’t think about graphs and lines regarding your report, but about consumer behavior, what kind of feeling matches your goals, and focus your measurement on these figures instead.

If it was your goal for instance to activate followers, your success is defined by how many people say positive things about your brand.

If it was your aim to support, your success is defined by whether and how many people ask you for support and advice, and whether and how well you have delivered that requested support.

Of course, even here, it is not all about specific figures, but about whether and how your hopes to change your relationship with your customers through social media activities have been lived up to your expectations.

(3) Look for "your" key figure

Once you have found “your" key figure(s), you can search for opportunities to measure and compare it/them within the social networks that you use. If for example the figures that you receive due to your Facebook activities are most important to you, you can look out for similar networks to expand "your" monitoring and come closer and closer to your marketing goal.