Monday, March 26, 2012

Measuring Success

When you are launching a social media campaign, one of the important factors you need to keep in mind is measurement. If you don't measure your success, or failure, then you won't know how you can improve in the future. Now, measurement is an idea that is often tossed around. Is simply counting the amount of "likes" you have on Facebook enough? According
to Shonali Burke's "5 steps to a successful measurement program", it goes a little deeper than that.

Identify the business objectives for your program/campaign: Keep in mind what your concrete goals are. If you are trying to increase client traffic, then focus on tactics that will get more people in your door. Your business objective should be what all of your strategies trace back to.

Identify how you will measure the success of these objectives: Set goals for yourself. If you want to increase sales, then by how much? What percentage of your client base should be purchasing your products? Set a timeframe of when you should reach this goal. This is something that the managers at my job do. They tell everyone what each 2 hour goal is, what percentage of customers walking through the door should be purchasing, and their Average Dollar Sale. That way, we will keep this specific goal in mind when ringing customers up so that if a transaction falls a little behind ADS, we can use tactics to encourage them to buy more.

Outline your communication strategy: It's a common mistake when people frame their strategy around the concept of the bandwagon. "Everyone's on Pinterest so we should post everything there!" Keep your audience in mind, if you are targeting men ages 30-55, do you think they'll be on Pinterest? Primarily, no. Post where it makes most sense.

Keep track of your efforts: Google Analytics is great for this purpose, it tracks the number of views on your website and then compares it on several different platforms like visitors, time on page, etc. across any time frame you choose. Bitly will also track the amount of clicks on your link if you are posting on Facebook or Twitter. Watch what you are putting out and what effect it is having on your statistics. Also, keep the time frame you are measuring the same, this will give you a steady, unbiased base to compare to each time.

How are you keeping track of your success? Are you utilizing Google Analytics? Let us know!

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