Are You Ready for a Social Media Program?
Before your company dives head first into social media, it’s important to have a plan in place. This includes defined goals you want to accomplish with social media and a well thought out strategy for accomplishing those goals. Unless you have those in place you’re just going to be embarking aimlessly into the world of social media and are likely going to fail in your efforts. But even if you have your goals and strategy in place, how do you know if you succeed or fail with your social media program?
In order to really know, you have to have the measurement capabilities in place at the outset. Ideally you should also have a baseline to understand where you currently are so that you can appropriately measure the impact that your social media program has.
The measurement that takes place should be done both on your site using your web analytics data as well as off site using social media monitoring tools. In addition, there is also a manual piece that allows you to pull more data into your reporting and analysis.
Using your web analytics data you can begin to understand the engagement level and value of visitors that are driven directly to your site from social media sources. Analyzing social media sources can be fairly straightforward. To do it, you simply segment out social media traffic and begin to analyze it in relation to your other segments and overall site traffic. You can then dig deeper and look at individual social media sites to begin to see which types of social media sites and which specific sites drive the most qualified visitors. This allows you to try to better leverage those sites that perform well and try to better understand why traffic from the under-performing sites is not up to par.
Social media monitoring tools are also very important to use in measuring the impact of your social media program. These tools give you great insight into where people are talking about your brand and what they are saying. This in turn allows you to respond where necessary and be involved in the communities that are discussing your brand both positively and negatively. The tools will also allow you to see who the top influencers are so that you know where to focus your efforts when engaging the communities. You often times can also see the demographic and geo-location of those influencers which allows you to get a better understanding for who they are.
The final piece is often a more manual data gathering process that isn’t easily obtained through a tool. These include:
- Subscribers to RSS feeds
- Comments per blog post
- Forum posts per forum member
- New community members
- Number of friends/fans
Having the data necessary to evaluate the success or failure of your social media program is a great feat and more than a lot of organizations currently have. You have to make sure, however, that the data is being used to evaluate your efforts and make adjustments to the program. To do that a social media dashboard should be created to pull all the data together which will allow stockholders to have easy access to analyze and evaluate how the program is performing.
Does this sound a bit daunting and something that is likely to overwhelm you and your organization. Well if it does, don’t worry, because you are not alone. Our team at Serengeti, however, can help relieve the sense of discomfort your organization feels when entering a world you’re not familiar with. We have the experience to setup a social media program that is customized to your organization and help get it off the ground. We’ll then train you and your organization how to engage in social media and how to track your success. So before blindly diving head first into the world of social media, contact us, and we will help make sure you have a clear view of the new social media world that you’re about to dive into.
