Posts Tagged ‘Twitter’
Four Ways to Measure Social Media Marketing Results
Monday, August 9th, 2010While there are unquestionably many ways that social media marketing results can be measured, the debate rages on as to whether it’s truly possible to quantify the ROI from these activities. Some experts contend that because social media activity is rich in metrics, you can and should be measuring ROI constantly. Others argue that social media is a tool, not an event, so applying an ROI to social media is akin to calculating the ROI of your phone, or that at this point the business risks of ignoring social media are so great that ROI is immaterial.
Measuring the ROI of social media is challenging for several reasons, the most significant of which is the problem of “last click attribution;” just because a sale or lead “came from” Twitter or Facebook as the last click doesn’t necessarily mean that site deserves all the credit. The prospect or buyer likely had several other exposure points to your brand prior to that click (visiting your booth at a trade show, hearing someone from your company speak, seeing an ad, reading about your firm on a blog or an industry trade press article or analyst report, etc.). Assigning proper credit to each of these sources is impossible; assigning all of the credit to any one of them is inaccurate.
Still, much of what happens in social media is highly measurable, and these metrics can lead to an least indirect evaluation of the value of different media, activities, topics and tactics. Here are four areas of social media metrics worth tracking, even if they don’t provide direct ROI calculations.
Influence: a.k.a. “reach,” these are high-level measures of your brand or company’s presence in social media, such as number of Twitter followers, Facebook fans, LinkedIn group members, mentions across social media (you’ll want to pick one social media monitoring tool for this and stick with it for a while, for the sake of consistency of month-to-month comparisons). This category can also include metrics like blog visitors and RSS / email subscribers. While larger numbers are generally better, keep in mind that it’s easy to inflate a Twitter following (note all of the spammy “Internet marketers” with ridiculously large follower counts) and that in terms of generating business value, quality is more important than quantity.
Engagement: A level deeper than influence, these metrics include the number of RT’s and #followfriday recommendations you get on Twitter, posts to your company’s Facebook wall, questions answered on LinkedIn or Yahoo! Answers, comments posted on your blog, etc. Anything that measures social interaction. Again, more is generally better (spammy blog comments aside), as engagement is the “social” in social media.
Sentiment: Are the comments, posts etc. being made about your company, brand, product or service generally positive, negative or neutral? This is a very important metric to track, but accuracy can be a challenge, particularly for mid-sized companies. Small companies may have so few social mentions to track that the process can be done manually, leading to theoretically perfect accuracy. Mid-sized to large firms may rely on fee-based social media monitoring tools like Radian 6, Alterian SM2, Cision or Vocus which provide automated sentiment tracking, while global brands can use tools like Neilsen BuzzMetrics or Cymfony.
No automated sentiment tracking tool is perfect (for example, “It sucks having a cold but NyQuil is helping” may be tagged as a negative brand reference for Vicks because of the way that sentence started). Accuracy is most problematic for mid-sized firms that have too many brand mentions to track manually but can’t justify the cost of the most sophisticated tools. For large brands, the number of social media mentions is so large that errors in automated tracking tend to cancel each other out, meaning that overall sentiment analysis can be highly accurate even though individual items may be mis-flagged.
Activity: Most web analytics tools, such as Google Analytics, can be used to track the number of visits, traffic quality (e.g. average time spent on site, number of pages viewed, bounce rate) and even conversion (lead or sale) sources. Again, while this information is certainly helpful, it shouldn’t be relied upon as a precise ROI measurement for several reasons, including the last-click attribution issue noted above, and the fact that some analytics packages (Google included) don’t measure social media referrals accurately; Google Analytics dramatically undercounts Twitter visits, for example.
Particularly in this tough economic environment, where every expenditure is receiving even greater than normal scrutiny, numbers matter. The C-suite expects justification for every dollar spent, including investments in social media marketing. You can’t afford to ignore what customers and other influencers are saying about your brand, but need to quantify the benefits of social media monitoring and participation, in some manner, as well. Calculating ROI with any precision is problematic, but there are still many aspects of social media which can and should be measured. These provide a picture of the benefits of specific social media tools, tactics and activities which can justify expenses and help guide activities—even without perfect cost-benefit analyses.
Five Social Media Marketing Reports and Guides Worth Checking Out
Monday, August 2nd, 2010Much has been written about content marketing from the delivery side. As advertising is increasingly looked upon with skepticism if not simply tuned out, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to buy your prospects’ attention; it has to be earned. Substituting thought-leadership content for ad copy—telling rather than selling—should benefit both buyers and sellers, by increasing the knowledge of buyers and shortening sales cycles (though this latter effect may be masked by current economic conditions).
For those whose job it is to generate leads and sales through content and social media, here are five excellent new resources to help increase your knowledge.
A B2B Marketer’s Guide to Great Facebook Pages from HubSpot (29 pages)
Though Facebook is generally more effective for b2c marketers than on the b2b side (as even this report notes), there are nevertheless b2b companies standing out from the crowd by getting results through Facebook. How are they doing it? This report highlights five tips, 15 examples of winning b2b Facebook pages, and eight additional resources on using Facebook for business.
Among the tips: build an active wall by encouraging “likes,” posting useful content on a regular basis, and monitoring and responding to wall comments. Take advantage of the medium using pictures and other media. Companies cited as role models include web conferencing provider Dimdim, HR software provider Taleo and telecom firm Unified360.
Don’t create a business Facebook page without checking out this report. And if your business already has a presence on Facebook, but it isn’t delivering the results you’d hope for, this report will likely give you ideas on how to improve your presence and interactivity.
Social Media Marketing GPS (91 pages)
Insights from more than three dozen social media marketing experts including Ann Handley, Marc Meyer, B.L. Ochman, Yvonne DiVita, Beth Harte, Scott Monty, Peter Kim, Liz Strauss and David Meerman Scott on topics ranging from social media research, ethics and strategy to branding and metrics—all in 140-character snippets. Yes, as Shel Israel writes in the foreword, “It had to happen—an entire book, one tweet a time, and yet it is a real book that will help you understand what SM is about.
SMGPS will tell you the why & how using social media, 1 tweet at a time. You’ll learn essentials in digestible little spoonfuls.
The book will explain why old-school broadcast practices are waning and new conversational methods are on the rise.
This is the way it should be. These days, companies cannot waste money. They need to cut costs.
And SM is MUCH more efficient.
Writing a book in tweets is like writing a very long #Haiku series.
Reading it should be both interesting and useful.”
10 Key Online Marketing Trends for 2010 (3 pages)
As online marketing continues to rapidly evolve, web analytics provider Unica surveyed 155 marketing pros about their technology usage and plans to develop this concise report. While some of the findings are hardly earth-shaking (e.g., budgets continue to shift from offline to online, and “[companies] will expand their social media participation and continue to nurture a wide variety of social media tactics”), others are more interesting.
For example, the report predicts that by the end of 2010, more than 3/4 of companies will use targeting and personalization on their websites. Two-thirds of marketers “complained about IT’s support for marketing’s technology needs,” a major factor driving adoption of on-demand or SaaS applications. And adoption of mobile marketing is expected to more than double this year, despite recent findings from groups such as Forrester that less than 5% of U.S. online users have ever used location-based applications on a mobile device, and only about 1% do so regularly.
2010 Lead Generation Marketing ROI Study (32 pages)
This report explores the state of current b2b lead generation efforts and, more importantly, provides recommendations for marketers on how to improve both the productivity of lead generation programs and the measurement of ROI. Nearly half of all b2b marketers said they can’t predict the impact on lead production from a 10% increase in budget.
But among marketers who do have the information to make such predictions, 6 in 10 indicated they could deliver more than a 10% increase in leads. Lead tracking metrics tend to favor last-click attribution and lead quantity over quality (which will hardly come as a shock to most b2b marketers). Yet marketers recognize that high-engagement tactics (such as webinars) drive higher quality leads than do “promotional” tactics such as incentives and limited-time discounts.
The report recommends using richer metrics to measure not only the last click leading to a conversion, but also the effect of other activities (e.g., social media, PR, advertising) that support that activity. This requires use of exposure and interaction metrics in addition to direct lead conversion measures.
MarketingSherpa’s Top 7 B2B Case Studies for 2010 (64 pages)
As the introduction here notes, “It’s one thing to pick up a workbook that provides you with best practices. But, it’s an entirely different challenge to implement those best practices into the real world…MarketingSherpa know(s) this better than anyone. Sherpa’s reporters spend much of their time scouring the business world for marketing case studies. And not just any case studies—but the ones that offer marketers practical solutions for their companies.”
This report presents seven hand-picked case studies from MarketingSherpa’s vast library showing how companies can improve ROI while increasing leads, generate effective content, improve search engine rankings, nurture leads through the funnel and more.
Disclosure: As a RevResponse affiliate, I receive an obscenely modest spiff for each download of the Social Media Marketing GPS report. The others I just think are helpful and interesting.
Social Media Strategy? Think Like a Reporter
Monday, July 12th, 2010Recent surveys have shown that while businesses are embracing social media in droves, many are doing so without any real strategy in place. Without a strategy, there may be no clear ownership, or definition of success, or measurement, or integration with other marketing and PR efforts—all of which can lead eventually to wasted time and effort, abandoned blogs and Facebook pages, and even the erroneous conclusion that social media doesn’t work for us.
Yet developing such a strategy can be challenging; where does one start? Most of us have, through the classroom, TV shows or somewhere in life, learned about the reporter’s questions: who, what, when, where and why. Just as these questions are critical to solid journalism, so they can be invaluable to social media strategy development.
Who: the first who question is who will be in charge of social media efforts? Responsibility should be placed as high as possible—with the CEO ideally (think Tony Hsieh, or Jonathan Schwartz before the sale to Oracle). If not possible, then responsibility should rest with an executive in marketing, PR, product management or customer service. If absolutely necessary, this leadership can be outsourced, but only as part of a close long-term relationship. Who else will be involved? In all but the smallest companies, there are often multiple individuals tweeting, networking and even contributing to the company blog. In these situations, it’s imperative to have a social media policy in place, encourage subject matter experts (SME’s) to share their unique knowledge, and remember that everyone who participates is acting as a public face for the company—social media isn’t a job for an intern.
What: what type of information will you use to attract a social media following? In b2c, contests, games, apps and coupons are popular content. In the b2b world, thought leadership content is key, but this can take different forms depending on your resources and style: blogs are the most common media, but video, podcasting, online presentations and articles are other ways to share information and education with prospects. What also refers to subject matter—in b2b, that usually means reporting on research, offering a unique perspective on industry developments, solving problems, providing how-to guides, or presenting other information that is of value to your audience and positions your people as the experts.
When: how often will you write new blog posts? Tweet? Update your company’s Facebook page? The answers will be different depending on your company’s resources, the amount of content you have to work with, the number of employees involved in your social media efforts, the specific social media tool and other factors. In general, more is better, and most companies could probably benefit from greater social media activity, not less. There is a risk of over-doing things, particularly on Twitter, but as long as your focus is on adding value rather than self-promotion, few followers are likely to complain. Most companies find that the amount of time they need to devote to social media, particularly to engagement, starts out modestly and increases over time as their blog readership, Twitter following, Facebook fan base and other groups grow.
Where: which social media sites and tools will you use? There’s no question that blogs (which usually mean WordPress), Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn have emerged as the “big four” social media venues. According to recent research, these are used by 70% or more of those active in social media (no other single tool was used by more than half of respondents). Twitter is probably the closest thing to a universal social media tool for business, while Facebook is huge in b2c, and LinkedIn is indispensable on the b2b side. These are the tools to start with, but by no means should a social media strategy be limited to these: depending again on talent, resources, corporate personality etc., other tools to take into account include YouTube and Vimeo (video sharing); SlideShare (presentations); social bookmarking sites like Digg, delicious and Propeller; online forums (there are specific forums for almost any industry); Ning (for creating your own community or finding others to engage with); PitchEngine (social PR); and social profile sites like VisualCV and PeoplePond, just to name a few.
Why: possibly the most important question of all. What is your company aiming to accomplish through social media? What are your goals? How will you measure them? There are at least a hundred ways to measure social media success and more than a hundred tools for monitoring them. While measuring social media ROI is difficult to do with any precision, it’s important to use what measures you can to help gauge the impact and continually improve your efforts.
Crafting a social media strategy is vital to achieving success and avoiding wasted efforts. It’s a challenging exercise, but one that can made easier by thinking differently—such as like a reporter.
Minnesota’s Social Media Event of the Summer
Wednesday, June 9th, 2010If your small to midsized business is struggling with questions about how to create an effective social media strategy, use social media tools most effectively, make the best use of your time on social media, generate results or other related issues, mark your calendar for this upcoming one-day social media and online marketing event.
On June 24, SCORE will be hosting its Social Media & Internet Marketing Boot Camp in Bloomington. Having shed both its original acronym and somewhat stodgy image several years ago, SCORE today is a dynamic organization that helps startup and growing businesses to maximize their success, through face-to-face counseling, online interaction, webinars, live events, and partnerships with organizations such as the American Express OPEN Forum.
This seminar will cover a wide range of actionable social media and online marketing subject areas, including how to:
- • Develop a social media strategy
- • Use online reputation management (do you know what people are saying about you? and what you can do about it?)
- • Maximize your social networking efforts while minimizing your time
- • Design an effective business website – then optimize it and measure your results
- • Generate revenue through email marketing
- • Use specific social media tools (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, blogging) most productively for business
And much more. Learn more about the seminar and how it can benefit your business. Hope to see you there!
11 Myths of Social Media Marketing
Monday, May 24th, 2010Though social media marketing is rapidly advancing in terms of adoption and sophistication, many marketers and business executives still struggle with it. They wonder if their organizations are doing enough, if they are doing things right, even if they should be involved in social media at all. This confusion is partly due to some still-common misconceptions about social media marketing. As the goal of Social Media is Simpler Than You Think was to demystify social media marketing, this post will attempt to de-myth-ify it.
1. Social media is so easy we can hire an intern to do it. Because social media is fundamentally about conversations, the individual(s) behind your social media activities is often perceived as the public face of your company. This person is answering questions about your products and/or services, responding to or redirecting complaints, sharing interesting content, providing more information…you’ll probably want to be a bit careful about who gets this responsibility. ->
2. Social media marketing is really hard. True, there are techniques that work better than others, guidelines that are good to know, rules of etiquette to follow and common mistakes to avoid, but the general skills called for aren’t all that uncommon, and the specifics are teachable. It helps to be creative, curious, articulate, friendly and helpful. Okay, so not just anyone can do it, but it’s not rocket science either.
3. Social media is only for the young. Argh, no! On the consumer side, the largest cohort of Facebook’s user base is the 35-54 age group, and the fastest growing is the 55+ cohort. On the producer side, the most important attributes are interpersonal skills and industry knowledge. Age is irrelevant in social media usage, and life experience is a plus for social media marketers.
4. Social media is free. Um, no. While recent studies show that about half of marketers say that social media reduces their overall marketing costs, it is by no means without a price. The primary budget effect of social media marketing is to shift costs from media buying to labor. The tools of social media are (mostly) free, but the time, effort and expertise required to make social media marketing effective has real costs.
5. Since social media marketing is labor-intensive, we should offshore it. Ooh, not a good idea. While offshoring works well for tasks like IT consulting services and software application development, it tends to be less efficacious for market-facing activities. Thoughtful companies keep their SEO efforts local (to avoid link-spamming, for example) and after evaluating all of the costs, many are even moving call centers back onshore. And see myth #1 above.
6. Social media marketing success is all about rules and best practices. Not really. True, there are guidelines as to what works well (being sincere, helpful and knowledgeable) and what doesn’t (trying to use social media sites as one-way broadcasts of your marketing brochures), but the field is new enough that many of the “rules” are still being written. While there are some techniques that seem to work well and are worth replicating, and others that should clearly be avoided, there’s also a great deal of space for creativity in this rapidly expanding and evolving area.
7. Social media marketing has no rules. Now, just because there isn’t an established cookie-cutter approach to social media marketing success doesn’t mean there are no rules. Don’t be excessively self-promotional, don’t try to automate everything, be sincere, add value—there aren’t a lot of rules, but these are a few very important ones.
8. Social media marketing gets immediate results. Almost never. Sure, you may run across an example somewhere of this happening, just as you may hear about a couple who got married three weeks after they met. It can happen, but isn’t common and shouldn’t be expected. Social media is about building relationships and influence. It takes time, but the payback can be much more lasting than a typical “marketing campaign” as well.
9. Social media marketing is too risky. This fear is most common in the medical, financial services, and other regulated industries. And it’s certainly true that there are situations where a company has to be somewhat cautious about its social media participation and content (another reason to keep myths #1 and #5 in mind). By all means, be aware of your specific industry and regulatory environment and put necessary safeguards in place. But people in your marketplace—customers, prospects, analysts, journalists, shareholders and others—are talking about your company and/or industry across social media channels right now. The real risk is in ignoring those conversations.
10. Social media marketing is new. Not really. Certainly the tools are new: Twitter has only been around since 2007, Facebook since 2006, and even blogging has been popular for less than a decade. But social media marketing is fundamentally about participating in and influencing the direction of conversations about your industry and brand. Those practices are timeless, but social media has increased the velocity and magnitude of such conversations.
11. Social media marketing doesn’t apply to my business. There are isolated niches where this is true. For example, if you build weapons systems for the U.S. military, you not only don’t need social media marketing, it would probably be best to avoid it. And there may be a few other such situations. For virtually every other type of business however, someone, somewhere is discussing your brand, your industry or your competitors in social media. You’re missing out if you’re not listening and participating.
