Lessons from the AMA’s Measuring Social Media Impact Webinar
Social media creates both solutions and new challenges for measuring online influence. Marketers are eager to leverage social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, but they are not always knowledgeable about how to measure the influence such efforts actually have on their brand.
Facebook and Twitter have numerical metrics, such as numbers for followers and fans, which provide a good foundation for analyzing social media impact. However, marketers can take these metrics a step further, calculating the ratio of followers to followees on Twitter, or studying the number of times their messages are re-tweeted. Grader.com is one of the tools that could help you analyze your organization’s Twitter, Facebook, blog, and Web site influence by evaluating such factors.
One way to measure - and boost - a company’s online presence is by evaluating the content posted on their blog, Web site, etc. The social bookmarking site Delicious is a great tool for identifying the type of content that is resonating with your consumers by evaluating the articles and blog posts that are being bookmarked. The number of retweets and inbound links are also good indicators of content’s success. Organizations can drive social media success by simply generating content that is interesting and valuable to their customers.
Tracking the origin of the traffic to your site and conversions is another effective way to measure success of your social media strategy. Knowing which sources are bringing in the traffic and conversions and which are lagging will help you determine which of the platforms to focus on and which to abandon.