How Can You Measure Your Social Media Reach?
Many small & medium sized businesses have jumped on the bandwagon of using social media to promote their businesses. It has been the modern day equivalent of the gold rush, as companies rush to set up Facebook Business Pages, Twitter Accounts, and to use sites like Linkedin to network for peers, contacts and potential customers.
But many are still left asking the question "how is social media helping my business?" If you are in that group, maybe you'd like to know more about tools that are available to help you determine how social media is impacting your brand awareness.
At least one thing is for sure:there is no longer any doubt that social media is here to stay, and that there are ways to measure it. The hardest part is really deciding which method of measurement, or set of metrics, you are going to use. In another recent post, we reported that fans of Facebook business pages spent on average twice as much on a company's products during a given year, and were 10x more likely to recommend them to a friend. But that was based on an extensive study by a market research firm. You may be asking yourself how you can build a measurement approach that will work for your business, and answer the important questions about how social media is helping you meet your goals
While this part may seem complicated, it ought to be the easiest part once it is rephrased in more familiar terms: what are the metrics your company is already using to measure performance? Why should you look for new metrics? The key is to determine how you can measure social media's impact on the metrics that are already in place to monitor the value drivers in your business.
Another way to reduce the complexity of this question is to remember the term "media" in social media. One thing that has not changed about media is that when we talk about it we are still talking about already familiar terms such as reach, activation or conversion, brand influencers, purchase, etc.
So how can we begin to rephrase your understanding of existing media in order to make social media a less nebulous concept? Start out by thinking in terms of how a magazine would quote reach figures to you in terms of circulation, and the question comes back to "how many people could possibly be exposed to each message you publish?"
The Hubspot CMS includes a Reach assessment tool that calculates potential reach by aggregating the number of followers on Facebook, Linkedin & Twitter plus the number of subscribers to email and Blog RSS feeds. Adding up your potential audience for every message does not mean that they will all see every message, but it can serve as a proxy for potential sales leads or referral sources. The important thing is to keep growing the number.
Accounting for duplicates, such as what happens when the same person elects to follow or connect with you on multiple social media platforms can present a twist and may require manual de-duping. Tracking growth rate as a percentage of the total population is one way to reduce the potential for error here.
When it comes to Twitter, there are numerous grading tools available. One is Hubspot's Twitter Grader which measures: Number of Followers, Power of Followers, Updates, Update Recency, Follower/Following Ratio, and Engagement and results in a a grade and ranking.
In the case of Facebook, Hubspot's
Facebookgrader.com looks at the number of fans you have, the power of this network of fans, and the completeness of your page, among other things, and also results in a rank of 0-100. In addition to tools like this, looking at how many friends of friends joined your page, or how many folks responded to a promotion is a good idea.
It starts to become clear that your ability to measure the effectiveness of a social media channel is intertwined with how you have been using it. If you use it to post content, to make offers, and place calls to action that drive back to a landing page, then the way you are using the social media channel is inherently more measurable.
For YouTube, you might look at the total number of subscribers and the number that watched or clicked through to a particular promotion during the time it was running. Similarly, in the case of your blog, you may look at total subscribers to calculate potential reach, but the number that actually read a particular blog post that related to a promotion is a more accurate measure of impact. For email, the size of your list is a measure of potential reach, but open rate and ultimately conversion rate are the business metrics you are probably seeking. Most Email services will provide reports on all but conversion and sales numbers.
Hubspot Internet marketing software can help you calculate the aggregate follower numbers, but it is still important to look at how you are using social media, the campaigns you run, and ensure that you are using social media in a way that lends itself to more precise measurement of its impact.