It used to be that the biggest barrier to good social media measurement was cost. The standard rule of thumb was that you should spend 10% of your budget to find out if the other 90% is working. But many social media budgets may be too small for that rule to work. So it’s a good thing that there are so many vendors all dying to measure your social media, because the competition has driven prices down considerably.

Today the biggest barrier is figuring out what data you need to create your metrics. Only then can you figure out what tools you need. Remember, even the most sophisticated measurement tool is worthless if it can’t measure progress toward your goals.

What will it cost to measure your social media? Here are the short and long answers:

The short answer:

There are at least 300 vendors in the social listening space and prices range from free to thousands of dollars per month. You should be able to get a good basic listening system for around $300 per month.  For more sophisticated programs that are more customizable, plan on spending five to ten times as much, depending on the size of your organization. Check out our Vendor Selection Guide to see which ones might be best for your organization.

The much longer answer:

Decisions, decisions, decisions

For starters, it’s good news that there are a multitude of vendors in the social listening space, because it gives you plenty to choose from. But vendors are the last things you should be thinking about.

Decision #1: Definitions of success

Your first decision is to decide what are the definitions of success against which you need to measure.

For example, if your goals include increase consideration, awareness, or preference, no amount of likes or follows can tell you if you have changed people’s perceptions about your brand. That requires a survey, or at the very least some in-depth human content analysis to understand the nuances of the conversations people are having about your brand.

Similarly, while follows and likes may be one way to measure activity, if the powers that be expect you to contribute to revenue growth, you’ll need a lot more than Facebook insights to calculate your contribution. At the very least, you’ll need a web analytics tool like Google Analytics, or you’ll need a good CRM system like Salesforce plus Social Studio.

Decision #2: What are you measuring?

The second choice is what aspects of your program you are measuring?. Does your campaign involve only earned/organic social media or is paid social involved? Are you listening for responses to your owned content, or all conversations? Are you referring people to a web page, in which case you’ll need the ability to bring in Google Analytics or whatever digital metrics your organization uses. Each situation requires different types of metrics and slightly different measurement tools.

Decision #3: How big a program do you need?

The third set of decisions you need to make revolve around the criteria and parameters of your measurement. First look at the volume of the activity around your brand on social media. If you’ve got tens of thousands of followers, and have a staff that is putting out social content multiple times a day, you obviously need a much more robust measurement program than an organization that is just getting its social media efforts off the ground.

You also need to decide what platforms you need to measure. This should be driven by your goals and the specific target audience. Make a list of your key stakeholders. What platforms do they use? Where do they go for information? You only need to measure those platforms and forums that are going to impact your key stakeholders.

Final question, are you looking for share of voice metrics? If so you’ll need to also track the competition, which will necessitate a bigger budget.

3 social media measurement budgeting rules to live by

Now that you know the important parameters of your program, you can start to plan. Here are three basic guidelines to keep in mind:

Rule #1: More data ≠ better metrics

A common mistake when starting up social media measurement programs is to try to collect everything possible. Remember, more data does not mean better metrics.

First of all, the biggest problem with most social media monitoring tools is that they lack good filters. Unless you are very careful about your search strings and filters, a computer won’t differentiate between Subway the restaurant chain and underground transportation. (See our series on getting good clean data.)

Secondly, most searches will pull in everything they can get their hands on, regardless of whether it is relevant to your target audience. So go back to your list of key stakeholders. You’re much better off starting with a set list of key blogs or Twitter handles and Facebook pages that are influential to them. Just make sure you’re getting all the necessary content that your key stakeholders are seeing and you can stop worrying about the rest.

One other factor in the cost of social listening are the networks that you need to monitor. Almost all vendors capture feeds from Twitter or Facebook, but not all cover Instagram, Pinterest, or LinkedIn. Make sure the ones that matter to your stakeholders are covered by the vendor you select.

Rule #2: You get what you pay for

For analysis, most social listening firms use Natural Language Processing (NLP) or text analytics to automate the coding of tonality or sentiment. As a general rule, the more you pay, the more accurate the automated analysis is.

While having humans analyze the volumes of social media data may seem cost prohibitive, it really is necessary to guarantee accuracy. We recommend selecting 50-100 key authors who exert influence over your stakeholders and having humans code anything they write or say. Alternatively, you can random sample posts (we recommend a 10% sample) to be human coded. If you decide to use humans to review either all or some (i.e., a random sample) of your social media content, figure $1-$4 per item depending on the length (technical blog posts will be closer to $4, Tweets are generally $1 or less).

If your goals are related to sales and revenue, you will need to budget for a tool that can track your social activities through to the end sale or lead. The latest trend in measurement systems are tools s that integrate social analytics with digital analytics and CRM. You will have to pay a bit more, and you’ll need support to set it up, but with it you’ll be able to get a lot closer to showing true ROI.

Rule #3: No shiny new objects

Finally, don’t allow yourself to get sidetracked by vanity metrics and shiny new objects. Keep your eyes and your budget dollars focused on the goals you are trying to meet. ∞