Here is my Six Steps of Measurement system adapted to social media measurement. This is an update of our earlier version (“Here’s How To Design a Social Media Measurement System in 6 Easy Steps” from March 2016). This revised version is more elaborate and includes answers to questions I’m often asked. (And, remember, if you’d like to ask me any questions at all about communications measurement, please join us for Paine Publishing’s monthly Measurement Hour.)
Let’s get started…
Step #1: What problem are you using social media to solve?
Whether you’re managing an existing social media program or starting up a new one, the first step is the same: You need to sit down with your boss, your boss’s boss, your board, or whoever holds the budgetary sword of Damocles over your head and get agreement on why he or she wants to “do social media.”
When leadership decides to make an investment (even if it’s just your time) they need to articulate a business reason for being there. From that you can develop goals and objectives.
If they can’t articulate SMART objectives, then suggest a hypothetical scenario in which it’s a year from now and they are so thrilled with your contribution to success that they drop a case of champagne on your desk. What would lead them to do that? Ask them what role social media played in that success, i.e., “Why am I getting the champagne and not some other schmuck in the next cubicle?”
Step #2: Prioritize your goals and get organized
Chances are, the desired outcome or goal falls into one of three basic categories. The category will determine how you need to measure it. Your rationale for social media may incorporate all three, but, for the purposes of designing your first social media measurement program, pick one and only one.
1. Sell more stuff
You can translate this type of goal as anything from “get more orders” to “increase clicks to the Contact Us page.” If you’re doing social for an e-commerce site, then your web analytics platform (e.g., Google Analytics) can be set up to track how many conversions are derived from social media.
You can certainly analyze social media to see if it reveals intent to purchase (e.g., “my cousin just got a new #Galaxy7 and I’m in love. Might have to trade up”) and then trust your social platform to accurately tell you the demographics of the author.
While many organizations adopt this approach, it requires a number of factors to be in place:
- First, you need a sufficient level of conversation about your product, and people must be expressing emotions about that product. It’s easy to track how many people love their iPhones, but a lot harder to find emotion around mass spectrometers—or any other more mundane or B2B products.
- It also requires careful screening because you’ll want to make sure people are in fact expressing preference for your product, not the person who owns it. A computer can easily get confused between “I love Stonyfield yogurt,” and “I fell in love while sharing a Stonyfield yogurt.”
A more accurate method would be a pre/post study of millennials to determine their level of consideration and preference for your product before and after your social campaign.
If you’re not an e-commerce company, you need to come up with an acceptable proxy for movement along the path to purchase. After that, you need to get everyone to buy into it. Typically that is traffic to a “Contact Us” page or some other action that a person takes to qualify him or herself as a lead. If you are using a CRM platform such as Salesforce, it can also be set up to track the source of qualified leads.
One note of caution: People frequently cite the goal of “increase market share” as a business goal for media outreach. For social media this frequently involves “increase sales among millennials.” These are not realistic goals for communications, since market share and sales are heavily influenced by pricing, design, and availability—none of which is within the purview of communications.
Remember: Simply growing vanity metrics or social engagement is not a valid indicator of preference or consideration.
2. Change your reputation or relationships
This category of goal can include everything from improving or repairing relationships within a community to re-positioning your brand, or appearing “hip” to a younger generation. Also in this category are goals like increasing awareness or consideration in new markets. The important thing is that if your goal is to change people’s perceptions, then you need to establish what those perceptions are to begin with, and then measure any change that occurred because of social media. In other words, you’ll need to be thinking about a survey or a content analysis of your social media.
This also requires significant up-front planning and forethought:
- First you need to establish a baseline prior to beginning a social campaign, if you’re going to measure change that occurred because of it.
- Secondly, you need to make sure that the change occurs because of your social media efforts, not just in conjunction with them. That means conducting your social media campaign during a time when there is no other promotional activity taking place (I realize that is a pretty unlikely scenario). Or, more likely, you need to ask people whether they’ve been on social media. If so, have they read anything about your campaign while they were there?
3. Get the word out about a new product, initiative, event, campaign, or senior leadership’s theme of the month
Organizations, especially those who are just dipping their toes into social media, frequently cite “to get the word out” as a goal. And, while it may be an admirable goal, it is frequently not realistic, at least for earned media. If you only have 50 followers on Twitter, then you aren’t getting the word out to very many people. (Unless one of them is Donald Trump or Justin Bieber, and they happen to retweet one of your posts.)
If you do have an established following, or have employees, leaders, spokespeople, or celebrity fans that do, you’ll have a chance of reaching a decent audience. But you still need to make sure that “the word” that you get out actually contains your desired messaging and positioning.
For that you’ll need more than just social listening, you’ll need to analyze what people are saying and commenting to determine if they are hearing your messaging. Ideally, you’d supplement social listening with a pre/post survey of your target audience to test whether in fact they’ve both heard your message and believe it.
Remember: “Getting the word out” means getting the right word out.
Step #3: Define a benchmark
Before you can begin any measurement program you need to know what you will be comparing yourself to. Since most organizations have other marketing and communications efforts in place, the best tactic for social media is to set a benchmark before you launch your social media campaign, and then measure the change after the campaign is complete.
If you’re entering a new market, you’ll want to compare your organization’s engagement level to that of the competition.
Remember: It isn’t measurement if you don’t have a benchmark.
Step #4: Define your Key Performance Indicators
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are the specific metrics that will define your success. They typically start with a percentage. Typical metrics for social media are:
- Percentage of conversations in which we were favorably positioned on our key issues
- Percentage of conversations containing one or more of our key messages
- Percentage increase in engagement level (see How to Measure Engagement)
- Percentage increase in clicks to designated URLs
- Percentage increase in conversions from social media
- Percentage increase in awareness/consideration/preference
- Share of desirable market conversations in which we were mentioned
Key points to remember:
- You become what you measure, so measure whatever you need to do more of.
- Limit your metrics to no more than five. Metrics drive behavior. You want them to be top of mind with everyone on your team, so when they come to work in the morning they are constantly figuring out how they can make those numbers go up. Even the best employees can’t keep more than three key goals in mind at any one time, so five can be a bit of a stretch.
Step #5: Decide on a measurement tool
You have three basic tools to choose from:
1. Content analysis
If your goal is getting the word out, you’ll need to analyze the conversation about your brand, product, or issue to see if the messages are actually being discussed. Content analysis involves the collection, reading, and coding of the various posts, tweets, etc. that mention your brand.
Automated systems can tell you what hashtags are used, what topics and products are discussed, and what spokespeople are mentioned. However, for qualitative metrics—like messages, positioning, or the building of trust or satisfaction—you will need human analysis.
Your options are to track social media through a free platform like Hootsuite, or pick from any of the 350 or so social listening platforms that are out there. Ideally you would select a firm that can track both your traditional and social media in one dashboard. Not only is it more convenient, but it guarantees a higher level of consistency, since presumably your messaging and key issues will be the same for all external outreach.
2. Survey research
If your goal is to increase awareness, understanding of your positioning, preference, or otherwise change your brand positioning in the marketplace, then you will need to ask your audience what they thought before they saw social media and then determine what has changed since you started your social media campaign. If it’s too late for that, you should at least include questions in your survey about their use of social media so you know how likely it is that their opinion changed as a result of social media. Platforms like Survata, Qualtrix, or SurveyMonkey are ideal to do pre/post testing to find out if you’ve moved the needle.
3. Web and social analytics
The most common metrics in use for social media are those that are embedded in Twitter Analytics, Facebook Insights, or any of the back end systems that are embedded in the platforms. Most of the commercial social listening platforms pull that same data directly from the platforms, they just make it prettier and easier to access and export.
While social engagement is easy to get, it is not the best metric. If your goal is to drive leads, or long-term engagement, or to sell stuff, then a tool like Google Analytics is much more useful. You can translate your chosen goal into a conversion, and Google Analytics can easily track the social impact on those conversions. (See this video on how to set up goal conversions in Google Analytics.)
Step #6: Analyze the results, draw conclusions, glean insight, and present your report
All this data is mere trivia unless you analyze it for meaning. So what if your competition is killing you on YouTube? How does that affect what you recommend:
- Increase the budget?
- Shift monies away from advertising?
- Invest in Google AdWords?
This is where you use your best judgment, examine your results, and prepare a report.
In any presentation of social media results make sure you define all the issues and topics right up front, or else you’ll get lots of glazed eyeballs. Then walk people through your methodology. Make sure you are clear about your benchmarks and what you are comparing yourself to. Explain any anomalies and surprises. Be sure to add a conclusionary headline for each chart to inform and enlighten your audience on just what the data in the chart means. It also doesn’t hurt to add in copies of key posts or tweets.
Finally, draw conclusion(s) and make your recommendation(s). Make sure you put them in context of the organization’s mission. Now relax and enjoy some well-earned praise. ∞
If you liked this version of the Six Steps of Measurement, you might also like to see it applied to events, dashboard development, and managing an RFP process.
