We all know that social signals are providing wicked search juice to the online marketing efforts of our clients. In just a handful of years, establishing a social media presence for businesses has become almost as important as building a killer company website. And yet, clients seem more mystified with the whole social process than we have time to explain. Most are skeptical about spending hours every week to goof off on websites where teenagers congregate.
When they ask the burning question about the real return on spending so much time and effort to be “social,” too many smart ass marketers have responded with “What’s the ROI of your phone line? You wouldn’t consider doing business without it.”
The Guide
Can the rate of real business returns on social media marketing efforts be quantified? Can we explain HOW we quantify social media activity in a way that small business owners and corporate executives can understand and appreciate?
The answer is absolutely, YES. And the team at Raven Tools has provided an excellent guide defining 30 valuable social metrics that take the mystery out of reach, engagement, and even the ever elusive social conversion.
The Basics
The first sets of metrics cover the basics of tracking social activity on the part of a brand and setting a base of how many people the branded messaging reaches.
These are the super-duper basics that demonstrate to bosses and clients that you’re actually doing something productive every day and not just passing around the latest funny geek meme to the rest of your posse. (Admit it, you know that there’s always that one client that thinks they are paying you to goof off.)
The Raven whitepaper breaks down valuable metrics to keep track of post rates, percentages of various post types, and how effectively you respond to customer service issues via social. That kind of data is sure to make the micro-managers smile.
Reach metrics help define how many people you have the potential to connect with, how they feel about your brand, and how much of the social universe belongs to you in relation to your competition. Those kinds of numbers help you clearly see the lay of the land and where to mine for marketing gold.
Meaningful Relationships
In business terms, meaningful relationships are the ones that help a brand gain exposure and do more business over time.
Defining and tracking engagement metrics will help you serve up the kind of content that gets action and amplification. With metrics like applause, conversation, and amplification rates you can demonstrate the value of likes, comments, and retweets to clients and bosses alike.
Showing Them the Money
The really sexy data is toward the end of the paper. Courtney Seiter, Raven’s Community Manager, gets into acquisition and conversion metrics.
These are the numbers that demonstrate how all of the social media activity drives website traffic and ultimately sales. Understanding the social landscape keeps community managers from wasting valuable time on social media, but following the social progression from engagement on a Facebook post to click through, to visit frequency and duration rates on the company website is what management will be most interested in.
The conversion metrics are the ones that really got me jazzed. Yes, Virginia, there really is a Santa Claus. We CAN quantify how social media assisted in the decision to convert. We can also assign a monetary value to that assist. How’s that for ROI?
If you want to get into the nuts and bolts of what all these metrics are, why they matter, and how to go about measuring all of them, get your copy of “30 Social Media Metrics That Prove Real Value,” by Raven Tools right away.
