How To Measure & Optimize Your Social Media Strategy To Get Results

Everyone (including clients) want a quantifiable ROI for their social media strategy that revolves around a dollar sign within a relatively short amount of time.

True data on social media return is usually in a longer cycle then the typical “cause & effect” data capture. What I mean is that you can’t measure results in brand perception, over-all marketing efficiency and positive name recognition in a formula of a week or even month long cause and effect formula.

My belief is that it is more accurate to emphasize measuring data that is based on your strategy effectiveness that lead to revenue rather than just the end result of just revenue itself.  That is, focus entirely on what you’re trying to accomplish with your social media program or campaign and then identify the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that will tell you over time, whether you’re making progress to your ultimate goal.

What Really Goes Into The 3 Main Measurables

While small businesses and new companies to the social media arena are tempted to over analyze their short term social media ROI, they really need to focus on identifying KPIs that will provide the road-map to business objectives your aiming for.

There are basically 3 kinds of applied measurables that you should be focusing on:

1. You brand perception: It’s why Visa sponsors the Olympics and why Coca-Cola sponsors the Special Olympics,. It’s why you’re on Twitter. It’s about maintaining or enhancing your brand’s reputation, perception and visibility. So your impacting KPIs that inform factors like customer satisfaction score or likeliness to buy.
2. You  marketing efficiency: You should be looking at your website, optimize for SEO and study where your traffic is coming from: Twitter, Facebook, blogs. (Twitter, btw, now drives more than 10 percent of the New York Times’ traffic. Facebook drives at least 13 percent of MSN’s and Yahoo’s traffic.) Study your analytics. I strongly recommend having a web analytics tracking system on your website. It’s all about reach. And that means you may need to track the little ticky-tacky metrics that add up to painting a fuller picture.  Some of those niche sources you will find can be responsible for more conversions than you think because of the targeting rather than pure numbers.
3. Long-Term Revenue growth: It’s about leads, lead qualification and the niche markets they’re coming from that lead to sales revenue.  So hone your marketing program to identify the people who will ultimately generate sales.  Measure downloads, registrations, new subscribers, optins etc and a host of other indicators that will shine a light onto revenue growth patterns.

Again, the performance indicators need to be the real areas of focus.  If you continue to push toward improving those, the increase in long-term revenue will follow.  It all tells a story so measure each area and tweak accordingly.  This is one of the largest opportunities for success and refusing to do so has been shown to be a key culprit for social media marketing failure.  You have to research, start with what you know then analyze and continually optimize in order to truly be successful in the long term.