Suze Bragg

Part 8 of social media marketing: measuring your progress
May 16, 2008

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There are several ways to measure how well you're performing on the social web.  They include:

1. share of voice (SOV - this is how often your "voice" is heard over all your competitors or who you're sharing your voice with),
2. level of engagement (how often are people coming back to the discussions about your products, visiting the sites, or generally being engaged with the topic),
3. tone of dialogue (are they negative, positive, neutral?),
4. evidence/quality of community (is there a community feel or is the hit-or-miss relationships?), and
5. cost of market share (interaction between what's being supplied and what the demand is for your topic/company/product or, according to Larry Weber, it's "securing share in priority markets at a faster rate and lower cost per lead than you'd typically get with traditional media). 

Questions you should ask are:

How often are you being discussed?  Who's doing the talking and how influential are the participants?  What are they saying?  Do they like you or dislike you?  Who's listened to your podcasts (this is easy since they register)?  Who's downloaded your whitepaper (again, they register to download it)?  How many people participated in your online contests and who are they?  How many people registered for your webinar?  How many of these things led to sales? If you are spending money, is your ROI worth the effort?

Using your online analytic software, you can also guage the basic information:

• You can measure where your visitors are coming from (the referring site)
• which pages they are clicking through (banner ad that you placed, google or yahoo paid links, from search engines, etc.)
• which pages they visited the most
• where they jumped off the site

Once you have answered these questions, compare them against your marketing goals:

1. For example, if your goal is to have people discuss whether or not your cosmetics should include the phthalates DEHP or DBP and your customers' views on the FDA's ruling (a subject close to my heart), you could build your community with discussions topics and count the number of opinions/suggestions offered.
2. Partner with an online community (like Momspace or iVillage) to sponsor a discussion about your products (for example, if you sell diet pills, ask how many people find them useful or what brands they buy, etc.)
3. Look for ways to gather real feedback and advice about your company, products, etc. Even if it's negative in nature, you'll gain a deep understanding of the obstacles you need to overcome.
4. If you prefer not to engage in an online discussion, send out questionnaires to your customer base. Keep in mind you may only get 10% back.

Once you have all this valuable information in your hands, you're able to more effectively target your customers and offer them what they need. Especially in this time of a slow economy, more people are online instead of in their cars.

PS. Free analytic software to add to your site:  Google Analytics.

Posted by Suze Bragg on May 16, 2008 | Comments (0)