The Definitive Guide to Developing a Social Media Marketing Strategy – Part 7: Measure the Effectiveness of Your Social Media Marketing Strategy

This is part 7 of 7 in series.   You can view the first 6 articles here: Part 1  ,  Part 2 , Part 3 , Part 4 , Part 5 , Part 6

At its core social media is a communication tool.  We use it to communicate with friends and family (I just friended my 74 year-old great uncle on Facebook – how cool is that?), colleagues and industry thought leaders, and to build relationships and interact with customers and users. So… social media is like a phone?

Makes things seem a bit simpler, no?

With this last post of my 7-part series on developing a social media marketing strategy, I want to break down the process of measuring / monitoring how your social media marketing campaign is performing so that you  can gauge the effectiveness of your efforts and maybe satisfy a C-level executive or two with colorful charts and numbers.

How does one measure the effectiveness of SMM efforts? Metrics.  Metrics gauge the quantifiable aspects of your campaigns performance.   Remember, in Part 4, we identified measurable social media goals because if you cannot provide definitive ways to measure you r goals, it is very difficult to discern when you’ve reached them.   Take a look at my measurable SM Goals below:

 In theory, if I have designated that these are the goals I want fulfilled within 120 days, it is feasible to say that by the end of the second month, I should be somewhere close to attaining 50% of the goals I’ve outlined – around 2,500 unique visitors every month, 700 or so subscribers to the RSS Feed and 1,000 folks who signed up for my newsletter.  Getting the information I need to measure my campaign’s performance can be done using tools like Google Analytics, StumbleUpon, Delicious, Technorati, PostRank,  and Woopra can provide comprehensive business metrics solutions that provide detailed information on:

• your site’s accessibility
• the way in which people are finding your site
• the amount of time they spend on your site
• conversions from visitors to customers via click-thru ads/links
• the number of visitors who arrived on your site/blog as a result of Adwords vs. search engines
• what visitors searched for or looked at while on your site
• historical site data vs. current numbers to let you see the areas in which your efforts may be improving your conversion rates

With the information you are able to get, you can put together an informal bullet point report on what you can do better or, if need be, pull together an executive summary which identifies how your strategy has met its goal and identify the areas where your plan can be tweaked for better performance.

In addition to measuring the numbers, if you are working with a staff, you will also need to evaluate your human resources to ensure that team members are held accountable for their productivity and results.

So what to measure?

So, there you have it.  A real, tangible action plan for putting your social media strategy together.  I wish you well.  Now, let me go and apply what we’ve learned.  -Sorilbran

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