Social media isn’t like other traditional methods of marketing like direct mail or e-mail campaigns. These have set objectives and ways to track response mechanisms to check open and response rates.
Social media, on the other hand because of the nature of the beast, doesn’t have those types of metrics in place. Social media isn’t like other traditional methods of marketing like direct mail or e-mail campaigns…and please don’t do it because everyone else is!
Thomas McMahon in a recent post, 7 considerations for tracking social media success, outlines some great suggestions on how you may want to evaluate your social media tracking.
Here are some highlights:
- Quality over Quantity - The only really important numbers are the ones that are following you that are truly engaged and interested in what you’re saying.
- Hearing vs. Listening - You need to realize that not everyone is always hearing you. You want to connect with your listeners and hopefully get them engaged.
- Participate and Engage - Social media is about involved. You just can’t post articles…you need to participate in conversations.
- Be Where Your Action Is - Define your niche market and then find out where like-minded people hang out. Those are the forums, blogs and communities you need to be active in.
Remember, social media is a long-term investment with no short-term ROI. Be patient, build your network and trust within your target audience and social will pay off in the long run.
What other considerations should be on this list? I’d love to hear from you.
John Sonnhalter
Welcome to my blog, Tradesmen Insights. I'm the master of one trade, founder of a B-to-B marketing communications firm to companies that target tradesmen in construction, industrial and MRO markets.
Another good way to tradesmen to make their advertising message more effective to use personal urls. An example of a Personal URL would be: yoursite.com/Jim.Smith and when “Jim” visits his personal url, the website will usually be customized to him. It could even include this such as estimates for their remodel for example. It also allows the marketer to track who is responding. Learn more at: http://purlem.com.
Good point and I’ve used them for clients and they do work. Thanks for the comment.
I agree with most everything in this article, however, I disagree that social media doesn’t have set objectives and ways to track response mechanisms. Social media campaigns should ALWAYS have an objective otherwise you’re just posting aimlessly into the ether with no real reason. It is absolutley no different from direct mail communication in that sense. No matter what avenue you use you should always have a measurable objective be it to increase registrations for a meeting, increasing visits to your website, etc.
You can measure the effectiveness of your social media campaign by funneling people back to your website from social media. By leading people back to your website you can track the effectiveness of your campaign by analyzing your referring sites. If your referrals from social media goes up then you know you are doing something right and it can give you insight into what content resonated the most with your audience.