7 Steps to Social Media Measurement
There are more than 1,000 tools that offer a social media monitoring solution, but only Radian6 owns the mindshare of this category. To understand better what it takes to measure social media, I spoke with Dave Thomas, Director of Social Media and Strategy for Radian6 at Ragan’s 5th Annual Social Media for PR and Corporate Communications Conference in Las Vegas.
Here are Thomas’s 7 steps for social media measurement:
- Establish your goals in advance – It’s easy to spend a lot of time in social media doing something. But before you begin, know your goals so you can be effective in your efforts.
- Tie your goals to your existing business objectives – Be talking about increasing leads and sales, not increasing number of Twitter followers.
- Understand that every department in your company will have a different definition of ROI – Sales, marketing, and customer service will each have different demands.
- Decide in advance how you’ll measure success – What will be those metrics?
- You need to focus on campaigns – You have to look at specific campaigns to be able to measure them. You can’t answer the question of what’s the ROI of my social media overall. It’s like asking, “What’s the ROI of my marketing?” Not an easy question to answer unless you break it into campaigns.
- Need to be able to track with web analytics – For example, if your goal is to increase attendees to a conference, then you can be very specific about measuring that traffic and results from that traffic.
- ROI is a formula. To calculate you need all the data – If you don’t have all the data, you can’t calculate it.
For more, read Thomas’ entire article here.
