The Number of Minutes We are Nice to Customers a Day
Social was once the iPhone of marketing channels. You just had to have it. You didn’t know why. You didn’t have or need a justification to get in it. Your boss let you do it because it was cool.
Things have changed. We can no longer measure our success by the number of minutes we are nice to customers a day. Most brands aren’t yet setup to directly get results, but ultimately, most of us want to drive dollars.
My clients often ask me how I measure social results. There are several different ways I do this – some direct, others less so. Bottom line – social can be measured. Here’s how.
Capturing Steps in the Right Direction
At minimum, I can capture proxies of conversion in social. I can look at purchase intent to see whether a target audience is more likely to buy because of our social execution. I can look at social sentiment to learn what a target thinks about a brand. I can look at social referral traffic to assess how many people the brand is driving to digital properties that can convert customers.
Capturing Conversion
When I have – or can build – the foundation to capture more direct measures of conversion, I can do even better. I can track social referral traffic all the way down to sale. I can capture customers saying they purchased a product because of their social interaction. I can track social coupon redemption too.
Capturing the Impact of Relationships over Time
Over time and with the right customer tracking in place, we can start quantifying success through trends. We can look at growth of fan bases, followings and corresponding social revenue streams. We can show connections between the relationships we’ve built with customers in social and their resulting behavior in life.
There are a wealth of metrics of social success – direct and indirect. The social brands I admire most are the ones who show me they can drive dollars for their brand, and drive dollars back from the brand to grow themselves in social too.
