8 Steps to Begin Your Social Media Measurement Program

Social media measurement programs are custom and unique for each company depending on their business objectives. Clients often ask me when they begin a measurement project “Here are the brands we want to monitor, what KPI’s should we include in our reports?” There are an unlimited amount of KPI's that you can use when trying to measure your brand in social media. You could have a crack team of 20 marketing pros with access to 10 different vendors, have an unlimited budget, and you still could not report on everything in a digestible fashion. You need to go into your program with a plan and a purpose in order to produce valuable and repeatable results.

  1. Objectives: Have a clear business objective before you step into any measurement project. Are you looking at the competitive landscape? Monitor opinions of a product launch? Increase Brand Awareness? Customer Engagement? or Tracking the success of a specific marketing campaign?
  2. Identify Channels: Understand that all channels are not equal and should not be treated that way. Total volume for every mention of your brand over the internet usually does not give you a clear picture on what is happening. Create publication/website groups to improve the relevance in your volume based KPI's.
  3. Value: Only use KPI's that add value. Sure your graph looked really impressive in the slide deck, but what happens when your boss asks where that data came from, or why is that figure important? Have these answers ready for any KPI you plan to use in a social media measurement project.
  4. Repeatable Metrics: Make sure that you are able to repeat the production of your KPI's. If it takes you the better part of your week to produce one metric,  you should find a metric or collection of metrics that are easier to produce.
  5. Change: Be open to change. The social media landscape changes every day, you should be ready to as well. I think you can stop writing to your customers on Friendster now.
  6. Weighted Metrics: Apply weighted values to each metric. Every metric has a different meaning to each company. Don't get stuck using a methodology that was built for an organization in a completely separate marketplace. Use the thought process behind the "Forrester Wave" as an example. Apply a specific weight to each KPI to reach one single score that can be easily shared with your executive team.
  7. Relevancy: When creating your goals and identifying channels you want to track, it is just as important to identify content you don't want included in your data. When using a social media measurement vendor, make sure they are filtering out spam, press wires, or any other unwanted content that could skew your data.
  8. Manual Effort: No social media measurement vendor will be able to automatically produce every piece of data that you need to reach your business objectives. There will always be a manual aspect to a quality social media measurement program and you should designate specific resources for this.

Posted by Nathan Ray on June 23, 2010 at 11:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack