There are a variety of ways to learn social media marketing. You can do this by reading blogs, news sites, participating in forums about social media measurement, or attending social media courses Johannesburg.

All You Need To Know About Social Media Measurement

Social media measurement, ‘social media monitoring‘ or social listening is a way of computing popularity of a brand or company by extracting information from social media channels, such as blogs, wikis, news sites, micro-blogs such as Twitter, social networking sites, video/photo sharing websites, forums, message boards and user-generated content from time to time. In other words, this is the way to calibre the success of social media marketing strategies used by a company or a brand.

What Exactly Is Meant By Social Media Measurement?

It’s about more than just so-called measuring a channel, it’s about measuring the impact of the channel and it’s figuring out how to find value because of what happens all too often when we talk about measurement, is people get focused on those easy to see social media metrics that are just right there in front of you.

How many followers you have on Pinterest? How many likes did you get on that Facebook post? 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 when it comes down to creating a measurement plan for your campaign 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 of questions. As with everything else we’ve learned, it all comes down to what works best for your business and what do you need to have that 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?  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.

2 Key Points Of Value For Social Media Measurement

There are 2 main goals when it comes to social media. A lot of this is about perspective because there are a million different things you can measure. But it all comes down to 2 key points of value.

1. Are Your Efforts Worth It?

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. Are we wasting our time or is what we’re doing actually helping us progress?

2. Is There An Improvement?

Further, the number 2 purpose of measurement is an improvement. This is the other key thing that we’re looking for is to gain the knowledge needed to make our efforts more effective. Basically to create that process of learning to refine and then relaunching our efforts when it comes to looking at measurement inserted digital analytics from the social media site.

The basic idea here is to look at the total revenue that’s being produced by your efforts but also considering the cost savings that are provided by those efforts because keep in mind a lot of times was social media, but not necessarily the direct value of how many products did we sell but it’s also how your social media efforts how the connection points that are created there what it enables to happen within your business.

Track Your Sales With Social Media Measurement

So sometimes that’s direct sales. You clearly want to track the sales that come from your social media promotions so if you put something out on Facebook. Especially if you’re using discount codes and stuff it’s really easy to go in and track that to see okay how much revenue came from this particular sale of this particular campaign, but sometimes it’s about saving money through the way you leverage social media may be reducing call-center traffic maybe you are having reduced brick-and-mortar hours because you’re doing more selling online.

Test Products Before You Launch

Maybe you’re using it to test products before you launch, so it was 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. It’s 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, a 77% customer satisfaction rating now after they implemented their social media parameters.

They found that the ratio could drop to one agent 272 customers and they actually saw a bump up to 87% customer satisfaction rating said Infusionsoft social media initiative save the company millions of dollars in overall support costs produce a 10% increase in customer satisfaction. So again that comes back to the economic value that is created through the actions taken in social media the same way that some companies find that they really pull some ice economic value and from maybe lowering customer service needs.

Are you changing call-centre costs a lot of times? Companies also get that media benefit so a great example of this is to 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 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 in the economic value side of things not understanding conversation value means understanding that is more than engagement because most of us consider further conversation that happens in social media to be engagement in there’s truth to that were looking a little deeper.

The idea of whether people are commenting on your post 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 are your social post met with silence you.

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, or even seeing that update due to algorithms. On the other hand, sometimes that content goes out and it’s just massively perceived you 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 is also the idea of conversational residence.

More Engagement Through Social Media Measurement

This is the ideal which topics, in particular, tend to produce positive conversation or open the door for more engagement. So by taking the time to look over all of the content you have coming in and identify those places where you see you really, really great residents 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 that we put out wider that resonates well with people and what do we do to create more of that type of content, sort of. What’s the with the happy medium of how often we can leverage that before. Maybe we pushed 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.

Conversational Direction

There’s also the idea of conversational direction. This is basically saying based on what relearning are we going to adapt our efforts moving forward. What new opportunities exist for content and for campaigns. Where do we go next? What are we seeing get brought up in a comment somewhere or maybe were looking on Pinterest and were seeing what’s the name of the pin board that they save our content to.

Maybe they’re leveraging it in a way that we didn’t think about that helps us know where we want to go next know if we move on to the idea of amplification rate to try and understand what that looks like this becomes 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 released it into the wild social media so this includes every day sharing includes influencer exposure. This includes when things tend to go viral.

Amplification Is A Strong Indicator Of Reception

So there are 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 are times where they share it because they’re upset or frustrated at it, but they’re still finding some measure of value worth engaging in talking about. So the amount of amplification. The taking place is a good indicator of how well your content is resonating with people that the amplification rate is also a good indicator of connection power.

How Influential Are Your Base-level Visitors?

In other words how influential 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 really strong amplification that indicates pickup by influencers and evangelists within a vertical or indicates an extraordinary amount of interest that might go past what your normal content tends to pull the amplification looks different on every network.

It’s best measured on an individual basis with different pieces of content on those individual channels overreaches 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 meeting its extended past what you were capable of doing on your own knowledge when we look at these different networks.

It’s about The Retweets Per Tweet

We look at what’s going no sort of indicating that amplification on Facebook was looking at things like the shares per update on Twitter. It’s about the retweets per tweet. It’s your share sheet you can get a general idea here it someone taking what they found in passing it along to the next person.

Now when we look at a channel like say you to we can take an example video. So, for example, the Crystallize video from Lindsay Sterling, 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 not only reached a good portion of who followed them below that her followers themselves came in to watch it not only went past that but completely blew it out of the water so again a great indicator of excellent amplification that when we move on to the idea of applause.

Rate this comes down to feedback. This is less about sharing her conversation and it’s more about the positive social reinforcement that takes place on channels. These are the likes of favourites and things like that.

The Applause Rate Is An Indicator Of Sentiment

Applause 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 what they like. So again where we were looking at a piece of content on YouTube. It’s not just the amount of use.

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 go to maybe a ton of people watched it, but did they like it. So when there’s way higher. Thumbs up than there are thumbs down. That’s a really good indicator that the applause rate that says to someone this videos probably can be worth watching if they’re searching for something on Pinterest.

They’re going to look at the number of repentance 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 would 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 get on YouTube. That’s gonna be the thumbs-up for her video on Pinterest. It’s good to be the number of dislikes 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 the ones we talked about applause rate in particular is not always a reliable indicator.

A lot of that’s gonna depend on the individual social channel that you’re looking at because the true value applause rate is tied to that specific channel it can really be a strong indicator on Facebook or on YouTube or people are used to giving the thumbs up, they’re used to giving you clicking that like button but it’s less so on places like Pinterest and Twitter were people tend to share their their approval through the sharing actions on Pinterest.

It’s more likely that they’re going to re-pen than it is that they’re going to click that like your favorite button on twitter, they’re more likely to retweet something that really like her 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 can give you that reliable indicator of what your plus 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 for certain is 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 out 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 analyst to be able to say here’s were looking for to be able to help interpret some of the data they bring back to you.

If, on the other hand, you’re a small company where you rely on yourself to be able to do the analytics to do the measurement.

Identify The Content That’s Making An Impact

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 torture content. Basically, do they like it too?

They prove that and do they think it’s worthwhile to pass on the others number four’s tends to be the least accurate social media specific metrics, 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 will.

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.

Do you use Social media measurement? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

If you are looking for ways to upskill yourself in social media marketing then attend one of our social media courses. Click here: Social media courses Johannesburg to learn more.

TOPIC: SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING