Social Media Marketing Measurement

After watching this video you should be prepared to identify the two primary reasons to measure social media efforts and use them to guide your digital analytics strategy to explain why, 

Economic value is about more than how many products you sell to an outline the four primary social media specific, 

Metrics and their purposes and to identify the appropriate applause indicators on major social channels let's begin lesson to social media,

Social Media Marketing Measurement 

Specific metrics and back in part one of this series we talked a little bit about what exactly it is we meant by measurement that it's about more than just so-called measuring a channel it's, 

About measuring the impact of the channel it's figuring out how to find value because what happens all too often when we talk about measurements is, 

People get focused on those those easy to see social media metrics that are just right there in front of you how many followers do you have on pinterest, 

You know how many likes did you get on that facebook post how many thumbs-up happened on youtube and again those have value and we'll get to those but measurement is about more than a, 

Predefined set of formulas that everyone needs to follow yes there's going to be some things that are across the board but really when it comes down to creating a measurement plan for your, 

Campaign or for your company your goals are going to define what has value so to get things rolling you need to be able to ask yourself a couple questions, 

Because as with everything else we've learned it'll all come down to what works best for you what your business needs to have happen so you need to ask, 

Yourself things like what is it that you need to know where can you get that type of information and what will you use the data for because if you don't take the,

Time to ask these questions it becomes all too easy to find yourself in that place of analysis paralysis where there's just so much information coming, 

In and you really don't know how you're actually going to leverage it or do something with it now there's two main goals when it comes to social media and a lot of this is about perspective because there's a, 

Million different things you can measure but all comes down to two key points of value the first one is the idea of whether or not your efforts were worth it the primary reason we measure our, 

Social media efforts is to answer that question with the amount of time and money and effort and staffing that we put into it rewarded by a positive enough roi to, 

Justify that investment that's the first and foremost thing we always want to look at is are we wasting our time or is what we're doing actually helping us, 

Progress further the number two purpose of measurement is improvement this is the other key thing that we're looking for is to gain the knowledge needed to make our efforts more effective the next, 

Time around basically to create that process of learning refining and then relaunching our efforts when it comes to looking at measurement and sort of digital analytics from the social media side there are definitely some areas that are very particular to this area of,

Marketing in fact way back in 2011 avinash kaushik introduced four key measurement points that could be used for social media and there's still a great starting point today if you want to read the whole article that he put, 

Together you'll see the link down there at the bottom tiny url slash fl - measure that'll take you right to it but i'm also going to walk you through sort of what they are and what they look like in terms of practical, 

Application so basically he boiled down the idea of sort of the high level social media measurement into the area of economic value conversation rate amplification rate and applause rate now when it comes to economic value the, 

Basic idea here is to look at the total revenue that's being produced by your efforts while also considering the cost savings that's provided by those efforts because keep in mind a lot of times with social media it's not necessarily the, 

Direct value of how many products did we sell but it's also how your social media efforts the connection points that are created there what it enables to happen within your business so sometimes that's direct, 

Sales you know clearly you want to track the sales to come from your social media promotions so you know if you you've put something out on facebook specially if you're you know using discount codes and, 

Stuff it's fairly easy to go in and track that to see okay how much revenue came from this particular sale or this particular campaign but sometimes it's about saving money through the way you, 

Leverage social media maybe you're reducing call center traffic maybe you're having reduced brick and mortar hours because you're doing more selling online maybe you're using it to test, 

Products before you launch so there's a great quote from one of the marketing team over at infusionsoft that talked about the differences that happened when they made use of social media to engage the customers to answer questions you know to not necessarily have everything go through customer service agents and, 

They said two years before they started the initiative they had approximately one customer service agent for every 55 customers and a 77% customer satisfaction rating now after they implemented their social media,

Parameters they found that the ratio could drop to one agent to 172 customers and they actually saw a bump up to 87 percent customer satisfaction rating said infusionsoft social media initiative save the company millions of, 

Dollars in overall support cost and produced a 10 percent increase in customer satisfaction so again that comes back to that economic value that's created through the actions taken in social media, 

Now the same way that some companies find that they really pull some nice economic value in from may be lowering customer service needs or you know changing call center costs a lot of times companies also get that media, 

Benefit so a great example of this is kraft who estimates that it pulls 1.1 billion ad impressions per year at four times better roi from their content marketing and social media efforts than they do from their targeted advertising, 

So again it becomes about shifting things over a little bit so that you're still getting that benefit but there's not quite as much money going in behind it and that comes into the economic value side of things now understanding, 

Conversation value means understanding that it's more than engagement because most of us consider sort of the conversation that happens in social media to be engagement and there's truth to that but we're looking a little deeper at the the idea of whether people are commenting on your posts responding to your updates and otherwise engaging, 

With you and there's a lot of different ways we can look at that one of those is the idea of conversational response so are they replying to what you're putting out there are people engaged or, 

Your social posts met with silence you know it's not uncommon for us to see this happening on channels like facebook where people put out an update and, 

There's literally zero response in fact sometimes only a teeny tiny infinitesimal amount of their followers are even seeing that update due to algorithms on the other hand sometimes, 

That content goes out and it's just massively received you know people absolutely love it and engage with it that conversational response helps us, 

Understand what in particular people really like and what they care about so there's also the idea of conversational resonant this is the idea of which topics in particular tend to produce, 

Positive conversation or open the door for more engagement so by taking the time to look overall at the content you have coming in and identify those places where you see really really great resonance really really high levels of, 

Interest especially organically that's one of those opportunities to look deep and see what was the content what was it we put why did that resonate so well with, 

People and what do we do to create more of that type of content sort of what's the what's a happy medium of how often we can leverage that before maybe we push it a little too far and it loses its value so again it's learning how to, 

Identify some of those wins in the areas of potential there's also the idea of conversational direction this is basically saying based on what we're learning how are we going to adapt our, 

Efforts moving forward what new opportunities exist for content and for campaigns where do we go next you know what are we seeing get brought up in a comment somewhere or you know maybe we're looking on pinterest and, 

We're seeing what's the name of the pin board that they saved our content to because maybe they're leveraging it in a way that we didn't think about that helps us know where we want to go next, now if we move on to the idea of amplification rate to try and understand what that looks like this beco

Mes about, 

The idea of a combination of share and reach because amplification is the measurement of how far your message manages to travel once you sort of, 

Release it into the wild of social media so this includes everyday sharing it includes influencer exposure this includes when things tend to go viral so there's several things we want to look at here one is the base level knowledge that amplification is a strong indicator, 

Of reception and value basically that people like you people don't tend to share content unless they find value in it yes there's times where they share it because they're upset or frustrated at, 

It but they're still finding some measure of value worth engaging and talking about so the amount of amplification that's taking place is a good indicator of how well your content, 

Is resonating with people now amplification rate is also a good indicator of connection power in other words how influential is your sort of starting point base level visitors and, 

The people who tend to engage with you and share your content because social sharing might help you pick up some new eyeballs but really strong amplification that indicates pick up by influencers, 

And evangelists within a vertical or it indicates an extraordinary amount of interest that might go past what your normal content tends to pull no amplification looks different on, 

Every network it's best measured on an individual basis with different pieces of content on those individual channels overreach is a great sign of really strong amplification overreach basically, 

Means your message is getting to more people than what that initial starting point of your reach was meaning it's extended past what you were capable of doing on your own now when we look at, 

These different networks and we look at what's going to sort of indicate that amplification on facebook we're looking at things like the shares per update on twitter it's about the retweets per, 

Tweet on instagram it's your regram on pinterest at your reap ins on youtube it's your shares you kind of get the general idea here it's someone taking what they found and passing it along to the next person now when we look at a channel like say youtube we can take an example video so for example the, 

Crystallized video from lindsey stirling we can see that she has 2.9 million youtube subscribers but when we look at the reach of this individual video we find that 70 million people viewed it that's roughly 25 times her subscriber, 

Count that's a pretty great indicator of the amount of amplification that was taking place with this particular video it not only went past or you know not only reached a good portion of who, 

Followed them you know that her followers themselves came in to watch it not only went past that but it completely blew it out of the water so again great indicator of excellent amplification now when we move on to the, 

Idea of applause rate this comes down the feedback this is less about sharing or conversation and it's more about the, 

Positive social reinforcement that takes place on channel these are the likes the favorites you know things like that pause rate is an indicator of sentiment or like-mindedness it's basically, 

Approval that positive reinforcement through social endorsements that serves as a good indicator of the willingness of your audience to communicate and of, 

What they like so again when we're we're looking at a piece of content on youtube it's not just the amount of views it gets it's also looking at what's the, 

Thumbs up versus the thumbs down because that's one of those things that people look at when they land on the content cocaine maybe a ton of people watched it but did they like it so when, 

There's way higher thumbs up then there are thumbs down that's a really good indicator that's the applause rate that says to someone this video is probably, 

Going to be worth watching if they're searching for something on pinterest they're going to look at the number of reap ends and the number of favorites and likes that are taking place because that's an indicator of how many other, 

People have found this to be really valuable content and that's going to help give us that social sway to determine whether or not we want to, 

Engage with that individual piece of content now applause rate much like some of the other areas tends to be specific to the individual social channel you're, 

Looking at so again on youtube that's going to be the thumbs up per video on pinterest it's going to be the number of likes per video on twitter it's the favorites on facebook it's the likes proposed but it's really important to, 

Remember that of all of the ones we've talked about applause rate in particular is not always a reliable indicator a lot of that's going to depend on the individual social channel that you're, 

Looking at because the true value of a pause rate is tied to that specific channel it can really be a strong indicator on facebook or on youtube where people are used to giving the thumbs up they're used to giving you, 

Know clicking that like button but it's less so on places like pinterest and twitter where people tend to share their their approval through the sharing action so on pinterest it's more likely, 

That they're going to reap n than it is that they're going to click that like or favorite button on twitter they're more likely to retweet something they're really like or to respond to it then to, 

Click that favorite button so you have to have some understanding of the channel that you're on and what you're trying to measure to know whether or not it really is going to give you that, 

Reliable indicator of what your applause rate looks like now wrapping it all up it's really critical to remember that there's a difference between understanding measurements what we need, 

To measure sort of how we need to measure between doing that as a marketer versus doing that as an analyst because an analyst clearly needs to have way more tools and way deeper insight and, 

Information here so if you're coming at this from the marketing side this should give you that base level knowledge and insight to be able to go and talk to your digital analysts to be able to say here's what we're looking for to be able to help, 

Interpret some of the data they bring back to you if on the other hand you're at a small company where you rely on yourself to be able to do the analytics to do the, 

Measurement i'd really suggest that you take the time to dig deeper by jumping into our web analytics course here at simply learned because there's going to be a lot more detail a lot more information and a lot more input on what it looks like to really get in and, 

Gather that data also consider taking a look at the conversion optimization course because that's where you're going to learn a little bit more about things, 

Like maybe split testing and what it means to try this effort versus that effort and to understand how that, 

Factors in to the testing that goes along with analytics now wrapping this all up your key takeaways from this video are one that it's rarely a good idea to base your metrics off of standard issue options you need to make, 

Sure that you're using your campaign goals to define the metrics that are going to be worth tracking for you in this particular circumstance number two conversational value not only helps you measure engagement it also helps you, 

Identify the content that's making an impact so that you can use that to plan your future content strategy number three amplification rate serves as a, 

Really strong indicator of consumer buy in towards your content basically do they like it do they approve of it and do they think it's worthwhile to pass on to others number four applause rate, 

Tends to be the least accurate social media specific metric but it does serve as a very good indicator of interest and offers the benefit of social proofing to help sway engagement from users who come, 

In and see that applause rate in effect and then finally while all marketers need an understanding of measurement it's best to work with a trained,

Analytics expert for your data or to take the time to familiarize yourself more deeply with what it looks like to really dig into the data this concludes, lesson to social media specific metrics with that we come to the end of section 10 social media measurement.