Effective Social Media Measurement and Attribution

The power and influence of social has grown to new heights in recent years. Having a social presence has almost become a prerequisite for most businesses, but is it enough just to create and host a social media account? How can you ensure that your social media efforts are focused and generating a strong ROI for your company? We’re pleased to have Kevin Zellmer, vice president of corporate and business development at Silverpop partner Hootsuite, marketing through social media share steps you can take to accurately measure and attribute your social footprint to the ROI of your business. Kevin Zellmer HootsuiteAt Hootsuite, we’re constantly watching the evolution of social media as it relates to business. We’ve seen social media grow from being the sole responsibility of one or two advocates within a department, to being managed by a slightly larger team executing social media across the organization. We’re now seeing social media marketing certification full-fledged social organizations emerging, with marketing, PR, sales, customer service, HR and other departments using social media as a strategic tool for success in their own ways. And yet, many of these organizations are still struggling to find ways of properly attributing the role that social plays in helping them achieve their business goals. To properly track and report on the social metrics that matter, you need a solid social attribution strategy in place. Here are four steps to getting started.

Align social media metrics with business goals.

Without context as to how they fit within broader business goals, social metrics on their own — such as the number of retweets or likes a post got — provide little value for marketers trying to prove the overall ROI of their social efforts. Align your social metrics with the specific business goals they best support so that your social data doesn’t have to prove results on its own. For example, if one of your main marketing goals is to increase word-of-mouth, then the social metric you should report on is the number of shares your posts receive. If generating new leads is a big priority, then the click-throughsocial media marketing consultant rate on the links you post to gated content will help illustrate the value of social. By reporting on social metrics as they relate to overall marketing and business goals, you’ll be able to better illustrate how the time, energy and budget you’re investing in social media is contributing to the overall success of the business. Once your goals are aligned, the next step is creating a social infrastructure within your organization that supports the other technologies you use. Connect your social media engagement and publishing platform to your systems of record — including your Web analytics and any CRM or marketing automation platforms. This will help effectively scale social media across your organization and create efficiencies when it comes to your daily workflows and reporting capabilities. For example, social media marketing ideas the Hootsuite App Directory contains more than 150 applications and integrations — including IBM Silverpop — that can be used to customize your dashboard by linking technologies together. Using the IBM Silverpop app for Hootsuite, you can track the social behavior of leads that interact with your brand through social networks, use that insight in digital marketing campaigns, and qualify leads through social interactions.

Time-Saving Solutions For Social Media Managers

As a social media monitoring software provider, Digimind provides brands with a social media listening solution to monitor and engage on social media and analyse and report on your brands and campaigns. As a result, we know that managing your company’s social media campaigns can be overwhelming if you’re a busy social media or digital marketing manager. Social media monitoring (SMM) is a mammoth task. More often than not, it’s perceived as an unmanageable mountain of mentions just waiting to be addressed: the modern day marketer’s equivalent to piling-up paperwork. But, with 79% of marketers integrating social media with social media marketing packages traditional marketing activities, opting-out of social media is no longer an option. Over 36% of marketers spend 11 hours per week on social media, whilst 62% spend 6 hours per week dedicated to SMM, according to a SMM report by Social Media Examiner. What’s more, small businesses are just as inefficient, with 25% dedicating 6-10 hours per week on social media, as indicated by a social media marketing survey, conducted by Vertical Response. Social media managers have become so obsessed with preserving online presence around-the-clock, with endless updating and meticulous monitoring, that they have forgotten to take a step back and put a strategy in place to address exactly where they should be spending it and how social media marketing proposal time should be allocated. The problem, however, is that marketers (83% of them!) haven’t the foggiest about creating a social media strategy, so that’s where Digimind comes in… It’s time to get over your “socialmediaphobia”. With a social media monitoring software to keep an ear-out for mentions of your brand; all you really need is a well-defined, structured daily strategy in place. After all, creating a winning social media marketing strategy involves working smarter, not harder!