Ways to measure social media effectiveness

Social media can be very much like PR – how do you measure relationships and credibility? In PR we can measure things like the number of key messages in articles and the amount of media coverage. For social media there are many ways we can measure how successful the strategy is:

1. Increased Revenue.
What was the level of business the client was doing before the social media campaign, and what is the level they are doing afterwards? Has it dropped, stayed the same, or risen?

2. Measure Buzz.
You can use online buzz measurers such as Social Mention by typing in key words and it does a real-time social media search & analysis. To  find out how influential you are on Twitter you can use Twitter Grader, Klout and DailyRT. Topsy is a search engine powered by tweets and for Facebook try Facebook Grader.

You can pay for comprehensive social media analysis such as Sentiment Metrics which gives the subscriber a report of their progress.

3. Increased Visitor Numbers.
If you have existing social media profiles, have they had an increase of visitors/subscribers since you started your campaign? If you have just launched your social media profiles, keep track of the numbers. Do your visitors/subscribers increase rapidly or consistently or not at all over a set amount of time (weekly or monthly)?

4. Competitive Advantage.
Do a before and after comparison. Are you doing better in terms of media coverage than your competitors? Can you determine whether or not you are doing better than your competitors on social media?

5. Search Activity.
Do more people search your business more after the social media campaign? Do you have a search engine mechanic that allows you view how many ‘searches’ there has been about your business?

6. Links and Sharing.
Do people link your sites to theirs? Are you providing links that are easily shared? Are people sharing your content. For example, Facebook has a share mechanic where users post content on the walls of their friends?

7. Audience Responses.
Are you getting ‘thanks’ or ‘very informative’ comments or feedback from customers on your profiles or posts? Looking at your responses, are they generally positive?

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Sydney Public Relations Agency, CP Communications provides specialist media, traditional and online PR strategies that get amazing results. Contact us today. For more PR tips see www.PublicRelationsSydney.com.au