Introduction to Measuring Social Media for PR/Marketing

“The main reason to measure objectives is not so much to reward or punish individual communications managers for success or failure as it is to learn from the research whether a program should be continued as is, revised, or dropped in favor of another approach”

—James E. Grunig, Professor, University of Maryland (From Katie Paine’s presentation, Social Media Measurement for PR)

One of the hardest things for people to grasp about social media is why it is worth their time. In public relations, often when suggesting social media to a colleague or a client, the answer I hear is “How do I know it works?” or “What’s my return on investment (ROI)?”

It’s important to understand that measuring social media is different than measuring a traditional PR campaign. Times have changed. We can no longer use circulation or impressions as the sole judgment of a campaign.

Here are the three parts to basic measurement of a social media campaign:

1. Define your goals

Imagine this scenario: Your boss tells you that it’s your responsibility to increase the year’s sales of your company’s product. You convince him to let you use social media, and you create a funny new video, and upload it on YouTube. Surprise! Your video gets millions of hits. A few months later, year-end sales arrive and aren’t looking so good! In this case, your boss probably won’t care about the YouTube hits; and instead will be upset that you did not achieve the main goal, selling products.

Like any campaign, you need to create some goals from which you can measure your campaign’s results. Some possible goals include:

Communicate with customers, employees, etc.
Drive Awareness
Have a Conversation
Crisis Communications
Sell Products
Launch a new product
Influence public opinion
Cause Marketing; and
Promote an event.

2. Quantitative Measurement

Let’s return to the above scenario. Your boss probably expects you to provide him with a chart and numbers from your social media campaign. Quantitative measurement provides numbers, allowing you to chart your ROI. Some things you can measure quantitatively:

Activity: Measuring activity allows you to determine the number of individuals your campaign has reached. Activity can include visitor traffic, frequency of visitors returning, video views, time spent on your site, number of program registrants, donations earned and demographic data you may find. Google analytics helps measure activity and provides helpful demographic info, including geographic location of your audience. Compete also provides relevant activity data, much of it free to users.
Participation: Measuring how people are participating with your campaign also provides quantitative data. Sure people are viewing your website, but are they sharing it with others? Participation can include anything posted on your landing page from comments to ratings. Participation also includes how people are involved (online and offline) with your campaign. You can use various search sites to determine how your audience is participating: Are they linking to you or bookmarking it on delicious or digg? Are they tweeting, commenting or blogging about it? Is your company generating profit because of your campaign?

There are numerous websites out there that help to measure social media campaign activity and participation. Besides the aforementioned ones, it may be worthwhile to check out webtrends, urltrends.com and socialmeter to measure how those are participating in your campaign.

3. Qualitative measurement

Because qualitative measurement often does not deal with specific numbers, it can be difficult to conduct. This does not mean that it should be ignored; qualitative measurement is just as important. Some things you can do to measure qualitatively:

Tone: It is important to measure the tone of your audience’s participation. Out of the comments you receive on your blog, are most of them positive? Are the twitter mentions of your brand simply complaining about your product?
Relevance: If you just use numbers when measuring your campaign, you’re not measuring accurately. If your target audience for your new product is young men, ages 18-23, how significant is it if Better Homes and Gardens’s blog linked to your campaign? It is important to look at your target audience when determining the relevance of your participation.
Influence: Returning to the first scenario: even if your video had millions of views, if it didn’t meet your original goal and influence an audience, who cares? It’s important to ask “Did your campaign influence an audience’s perception? Did it generate new ideas, or start conversations? Did it even influence your target audience?”

Conclusion

There is no absolute guide to measuring social media, and each project needs to be measured differently. The more you use social media, the better you’ll understand how to measure it. Every day, new measurement tools come out, new white papers are published, and new “experts” claim to have answers to social media measurement. Look at how others have measured their campaigns, and see how it can work for you.

This is a very brief introduction on getting started with measuring social media. For more details and other tips and ideas on how to measure your social media campaign, including some great case studies, I recommend checking out KD Paine. KD Paine’s entire blog is devoted to social media measurement. She has given numerous presentations on how to measure social media and you can follow her on Twitter. Also, visit the Social Media Metrics Wiki for various resources on social media metrics, measurement and ROI.

Melissa Koski is a graduate of Boston College (B.A., Communications) and currently works at Edward Howard, a public relations firm based in Cleveland, Ohio. As an account executive, Melissa has worked for clients such as Synapse Biomedical, BioEnterprise, Windstream, Wal-Mart, CFFA, DASMA and BP. A self-proclaimed “social media junkie,” Melissa takes an active role in Edward Howard’s social media initiatives. As one of the founding members of the Cleveland Social Media Club, Melissa is in charge of the Events Committee.

Topics: Professional Best Practices

Tags: analytics, goals, influence, measurement, metrics, public relations, ROI