Some businesses are reluctant – even scared – to invest in social media campaigns, seeing them as a big dark hole eating up vast amounts of marketers’ time. They perceive social media efforts to require a lot of one-to-one communication that is difficult to measure. However, just like television, newspaper and radio, social media campaigns reach a defined audience that can be measured. Campaigns are arguably more engaging than traditional media. New measurement techniques are evolving that centre around defining the number of interactions and links. Three key measures include:
1. Engagement – i.e. what actions have resulted from ongoing social media efforts such as number of replies, comments, retweets, bit.ly clicks, Facebook “likes”, and many other activities that build affinity.
2. Reach – This counts how many people your social media campaign reaches. Measures include how many followers you have, how many people have watched Youtube videos, the number of Facebook fans you have, and any other ways you have created “direct reach”. A new product called Spredfast has been developed which is a tool for social media campaign execution and measurement. In future product revisions, they are considering adding further reach indicators like friends-of-friends or followers-of-followers.
3. Activity – how many things you do on the various social media outlets, e.g. number of tweets, links, messages that are published through a particular campaign.
For a review of the Spredfast product, see:
