Social media metics How to monitor a Social Media campaign?

Transcription

1 Social media metics How to monitor a Social Media campaign? White paper Summary I II III IV V VI VII VIII IX X Introduction Preparing the website Setting up the objectives Measuring the traffic on the website Blogosphere influence RSS Twitter Facebook Video-sharing websites Conclusions I Introduction Measuring the media campaigns was always a challenge, starting with classical campaign in print or on TV In time, press and TV lost their monopoly as unique sources of information, now competing with blogs and socializing networks Once with the exodus of the potential advertising clients towards Internet, the online began to be used by small and big companies that try to send their message to consumers through this channel also Once Internet become more and more accessible and used and with companies orientating now towards online, this generated an important challenge for many marketers: how to measure an online campaign s efficiency when classical tools such as Google Analytics are not enough? While some specialists are yet skeptic in what concerns the measurement of ROI (return on investment) in social media, we say that social media offers some of the best tools to measure online efficiency Germany Alex Manoogian St Armenia

2 Once with the apparition of social media, online campaigns must focus on respecting the audience in order to facilitate and influence the conversation and not invade the potential client with unsolicited advertising messages Social Media ROI measuring is, for many people, just an abstract concept, because the tools and methodologies for measuring were non-existent or ignored Moreover, if we would focus only on data, we will neglect the main purpose, which is to build a relationship with the client and to stimulate the dialogue around the brand According to the 2010 Omniture Online Analytics Benchmark Survey, 80% of the respondents think that measuring ROI from online marketing activities is important, but only 31% from the companies can measure this it Ignoring this aspect determined, many ways, to online communication actions made with no strategy, clear messages or objectives, and the lack of those metrics had as a result an absence of the measurements in this medium This whitepaper will present techniques and tools that can be used to measure a social media campaign, but also performance indicators for communication channels II Preparing the website Before starting a social media campaign or any digital campaign for that matter, we have to make sure that the website is aligned to the functionality and navigation standards for websites Follow the questions list below to check up if your website is functional and ready to launch: 1 Is the website correctly shown in all browsers, at different resolutions? 2 Are there any grammar mistakes in the content? 3 Do you have installed and functioning Google Analytics or any other tracking system? 4 Are all the hyperlinks functional? 5 Is there a sitemap of the website? 6 Is there a contact page? Is the form included in it functional? 7 Do you have a 404 page? 8 Are the images and videos on the website working and load fast? 9 Do all the pages have titles? 10 Did you exclude the parameters included in URLs? 11 Did you created a landing page for the campaign? 12 Did you included links towards Twitter, Facebook, Youtube profiles? Are those links functional? Prepare your website for a digital campaign before launching it and you will diminish the risk of losing potential clients! Germany Alex Manoogian St Armenia

3 III Setting up the objectives A Social Media marketing campaign can have multiple objectives, depending on the used communication channels Those objectives should not limit only to increase the number of followers or the website traffic The most frequent quantifiable objectives when we are talking about a digital campaign that runs on social networks are: Brand awareness Be it a small company or an important brand in a certain sector, social media can change Internet user s perception about that particular company or brand For the brands that already exist on the market, social media can help spread a message or a campaign, while small companies can use this channel to make themselves known to their potential clients Conversions Although social media is not a channel that sells like SEO or PPC, an objective often present for those campaigns is represented by selling a service or a product This should not be considered as a main objective, when there are other channels specially created for this purpose Reputation management When a company launches a digital campaign, it should demonstrare openness towards conversation, including towards negative opinions regarding a product or a service Social media can help a campaign to influence the way the client perceives the brand Traffic When there isn t a campaign or a message to send, social media can be a good referral for company s website The generated traffic can vary, depending on the content s quality and the frequency with which it is updated IV Measuring the traffic on the website Below you can find the most used indices to measure the success of a digital campaign You can have access to this type of indices thorough software such as Google Analytics Number of visitors Traffic is an important objective for a digital campaign and can be easily measured For a report to include the traffic generated by all social networks, create a customized report in the Custom reports section Page views Page views represent the interest shown by your website user The bigger it is compared to the number of visitors, the better Time spent on the website Time spent on the website represents a good index to show how interested is your website user with the content on the website Bounce Rate The bounce rate shows the quality of a landing page or the quality as a whole of the entire website When the bounce rate is over 60%, it is a sign that the website needs a series of changes in order to retain visitors longer Traffic Sources Find out which are the websites and blogs that send visitors and which of those visitors are more interested in the content on your website Germany Alex Manoogian St Armenia

4 Conversions If your objective is a quantifiable and clear one, its measuring can be done with ease using tools such as Google Analytics, through installing a code on the final page of the conversion By measuring a conversion, we can see which traffic source is the most valuable for our campaign, generating the biggest number of conversions It is recommended to install Google Analytics from the first day when the website is functional, even if you will not use those statistics immediately You will be able to compare this way the traffic on the website before and after the campaign Generating reports that include more traffic sources can be done via Custom Reporting section V Blogosphere influence Key metrics Organic mentions of your brands on blogs The number of comments attracted by the posts related to your brand The traffic generated by blogs and its quality The general tone of the blog post and of the comments The increase of the direct traffic, compared to the month before The traffic increase generated by keywords related to the brand, compared to the month before VI RSS If the launch of the website was accompanied by the launch of a blog as a tool to communicate with the clients, some feed monitoring services are offering the possibility to follow how many visitors are subscribing to your blog For a communication campaign, set as one of the objectives the subscription to the RSS feed of the blog Germany Alex Manoogian St Armenia

5 VII Twitter The explosive growth of the micro-blogging platform Twitter had as a result the apparition of a diverse range of applications that expand considerably the functionality of the service This section will present some of the tools or websites used to monitor the success of a Twitter account Tweeplet Twak is a website that monitors the number of followers cumulated by a Twitter profile along the time and the number of un-followers It also offers the possibility to generate reports with this data Bitly is a service used to shorten the links posted via Twitter Adding a + at the end of the posted link, you can see the number of clicks received and which users retweeted the link Twitter Reactions an easy to use Google Chrome extension that helps you see the reactions on Twitter for the page you are visiting Twitalyzer a useful tool that measures the impact a user has in its network and if he is an influencer or a follower This service also offers paid packages for a great variety of statistics For a holistic analysis, you should analyze your site with the help of the data offered by the above mentioned websites and the traffic generated by Twitter, according to Google Analytics This way, you will be able to see if the adopted strategy reaches the targeted public and fulfills the set objectives There are a few important indices you have to take in consideration: Number of followers Number of replies Number of re-tweets VIII Facebook In contrast with Twitter, Facebook comes with Insights, its own analysis system for brand pages With this option, you can see the distribution of page s fans in terms of sex or age, and also how much they interact with your page When you measure a communication campaign on Facebook, you have to take in consideration the following indices: Number of fans and their growth rate Number of posts on the Wall made by fans Fans demographic data Engagement how many fans are interacting with your page (Interactions) and which is the quality of the posts (Post Quality) Number of page views for your page The click rate how many persons are clicking on the links towards your website Conversions how many people from the ones that come on Facebook you are converting Number of persons that accepted the invitation to an event Facebook insights Germany Alex Manoogian St Armenia

6 IX Video-sharing websites Promoting a product, service or creating an informational video can represent an important part in a social media campaign This section will present the main data that need to be taken in consideration in monitoring traffic and measuring the success of a video clip As an example, we will refer to YouTube the most popular video-sharing platform and the statistics offered thorough YouTube insights Number of visualizations or the video YouTube insights Number of comments generated How many times the video was referred (on Twitter, blogs and others) The bounce rate for the page where the video is integrated (if it is the case) Clicks that came from video s page (if a link was given in its description) Number of organic searches for keywords related to the brand (especially keywords mentioned in the video clip) X Conclusions Although it might seem a challenging duty for the classic marketers, measuring a social media campaign is a simple and easy to administer process as long as we do not expect to use a single tool Starting from defining the objectives of a campaign (awareness, lead generation, sales etc), taking in consideration the most important KPIs (key performance indicators) and measuring ROI (return on investment), we will create a clear plan for measuring each activity, at the same time paying attention to analyzing the traffic generated by the campaign For campaigns with a special budget for monitoring the social media campaigns, we recommend the use of paid software, build to address these needs In spite of the created buzz, social media is a phenomenon that will be adopted more and more in the online marketing campaigns Germany Alex Manoogian St Armenia