The Q Group
Management guru and consultant Peter Drucker once said, “What we measure, we improve.” Drucker was also a leading contributor to Management by Objectives, or MBO, which helped improve an organization’s performance through the use of clearly defined, measurable objectives. Small and mid-sized companies often employ S.M.A.R.T goals, i.e., specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-based.
When developing a marketing campaign, if you fail to adequately define the criteria for measuring a successful outcome (e.g., new customers, increased product sales, improved retention rates, bragging rights to a robust community of followers, etc.), there’s no way of concluding if your efforts have succeeded or fallen short. And that applies to every marketing strategy, including social media. In my previous article, I wrote about the opportunities to be found in social media and cross channel marketing. Now, let’s focus on using metrics and tracking tools to analyze of results of your social media campaigns.
As we all know, some of the biggest social media players are Facebook, Twitter and YouTube (with LinkedIn, Slideshare, Vimeo, Instagram and Pinterest also boasting significant audiences). Each platform provides its own particular audience (some more targeted than others), as well as methods to measure the campaigns and posts that are directed to that audience. For example:
• Facebook. Facebook offers a variety of tools to track the results of your business page. Simply go to the Insights Bar. There you’ll find valuable information including how many people viewed your pages (i.e., page views), how many liked your page and/or commented on it, as well as more detailed information about the engagement. For instance, Facebook’s tracking may show that the majority of users visited your page between 3 p.m. and 7 p.m. Knowing this, you can now plan new updates that are always posted during that time frame. In addition, Facebook allows you to segment your audience into groups, such as your top customers. This can help to better customize your posts and/or offers, thereby increasing responsiveness.
• Twitter. Twitter’s analytic offerings include total number of tweets and top tweets, as well as replies to tweets. In addition, you can track “impressions,” or the number of times users saw your tweet on Twitter. Statistics on “engagement” are also available which represent the total number of times a user interacted with your tweet, through clicks, retweets, replies, follows, and likes. Divide the number of engagements by total number of impressions to get an “engagement rate.”
• YouTube. This is definitely one of my favorite social media platforms as the use of video typically heightens engagement. YouTube’s analytics system is called “Creator Studio.” It provides concise information about performance and engagement, including number of views and likes and dislikes. Total views are based on whether someone watched your entire video, or just one minute of it. A very helpful tool is “average view duration.” This shows the average time spent watching your video, letting you determine the ideal length for future postings. As with the other social media platforms, YouTube’s Creator Studio also reports the specific time of day people are viewing your offerings, as well as such demographics as age, gender and geography.
In addition to the above tools that are built into every social media platform, there are a myriad and growing number of third-party analytics programs that go beyond what Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube provide. For instance, depending on how active and diversified your social media marketing is, some programs consolidate the results of all your platform efforts so you can conveniently compare results across all social media channels.
Likewise, in addition to analytics, some third-party programs offer more specialized, full-service functions, like disbursements (they’ll deploy your posts), automatic publishing, and content management. They may also offer keyword filtering so you can manage multiple campaigns simultaneously. What some people don’t realize is that Google Analytics also lets you create tracking reports for all of your social media platforms. Do some research to uncover which social media analytics tool works best for your brand, your product and your industry.
Social media provides results that are very measurable, as long as you define outcomes. If you’re just starting out, use basic analytics to understand and track your customer’s journey, i.e., why are they reacting to or sharing your posts, clicking on your tweets, watching your videos, ordering your product? What is the ultimate purpose of their visit? You can then use what you’ve measured to keep them coming back for more, optimizing their responsiveness and improving your results.
That’s Q from the street.
Anthony Quaranta is the president of The Q Group, Hauppauge, N.Y
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