In most cases and as general concept, the more hits your website receives, the better your social media is performing. Here are some general ‘engagement’ metrics that you can monitor once visitors arrive:
- Unique visitors
- Page views per visitor
- Time spent on site
- Total time spent per user
- Frequency of visits
- Depth of visit
- Conversions
In business, CEO's and execs want to know if ever dollar that is put, turns a decent profit margin. This is also known as their return on their investment. That's the problem with social media measurements. You simply can't measure ROI this way. There are just so many intangibles. I brought up this concept a while ago, but let's get into it again.
Say someone is on your site and then tells a friend about it and that friend makes a purchase. How do you measure that? Don't forget the the salary that is handed to the employees that manage the site or involved within the social media realm. So that's already a sunk cost, and needs to be recovered via sales. There are so many intangibles that can be measured by any Google analytics tools.
Although there is no direct measurement with social media, there is still a large market audience to gain.
5 comments:
It's literally impossible to measure the amount of word of mouth marketing your product or service gets. the best you can do is hope that there is a blogger out there who routinely follows your company and blogs about it.
however, when i worked at paramount our entire base of getting movies out there was word of mouth screenings. there was no way to measure how many people knew about the movie but we could only hope we targeted the right opinion leaders to spread the word.
Interesting ideas you have Boris.
From your list of metrics, the leading indicator in my opinion is conversation.
To measure the success of a blog or website : the quality of conversations should be assessed which can be the most challenging metric.
Yooousif
I agree with you that there is no way to measure the profit impact of social media, but could there be? Using the metrics you described and some other statistics out there, I'm sure someone could find a way to put a dollar amount on it. Some things can already be quantified like consumer comments that alert managers to poor service representatives and salespeople, directly hurting the bottom line. Openness to customers can provide many answers to questions a company hasn't thought to ask and those answers can lead to increased sales and profits.
Word of mouth is one of the most powerful and compelling marketing devices; unfortunately, it's something where marketing departments are completely powerless. The only thing a company can do is stimulate word of mouth by creating an exceptionally good product or service and reaching out to the right customers to get the word out. And social media - as we've discussed throughout the semester - is one of the best ways to find those customer.
Great post. I think the only existing realistic way to measure ROI is through advertising sales on sites like Facebook and MySpace.
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