Social media, it’s trending duh! With so many creative ways
to grab facebooker’s and twitterhead’s attention, it has become that main
ingredient for any successful product launch. Social media has become the ideal
place to get your product’s engines revved, and send them off from the starting
line with the most buzz. With the countless unique outputs social media
provides, it’s seemingly flawless. But wait! Does all this social media
impressiveness result in the increased sales like we desire? Umm, yes? Well
prove it!
I knew something had to be wrong, nothing is that perfect! “One
of the greatest challenges with using quantitative measures for social media is
that not all social media can be tracked… it lacks descriptive information: you
know how many are in your audience, but you don’t know who your audience are”
(Howard, Mathews, 2013).
So how do we
determine that the campaign ran on social media, reaching all those ears and
eyes, will result in a profitable outcome? In social media eyes are usually
drawn to the outputs like the hilarious photos or seat edging sneak peaks. But will
it increase that chang-a-lang in that big corporate pocket? So before we go off
about how social media is the greatest thing to happen in marketing since the
billboard first hit those sad empty streets, we need to find out how to measure
that outcome.
You can start by making friends with programs that can help you
determine the shiny success of your social media. Tools such as Google
Analytics, Klout, Wildfire’s Social Media Monitor, and My top Tweet by
TwitSprout provide some good insight into the demographics on your social media
posts. This is one little birdie you do not want to let go of.
Now lets see how you
would do. Lets take goaheadtours.com, first advertisement displayed on my
facebook home page (interesting enough I was just looking at trips to
Italy…creeps.), and examine how we would measure its impact on social media.
What is the first thing you would do to measure your success on social media if
you were goaheadtours.com?
First step would be to define the social media success by
establishing clear audiences, goals, and measurable success. Measure social
media engagement by tracking the amount of shares and comments it has, but keep
in mind that you want to measure influence
not popularity. Use your measurements to determine what has and hasn’t worked.
Do you think social media can be a truly measurable market?
Have you found it to be a useful tool when marketing your
own products or even yourself?
How could social media be counterproductive and work against
you?
