So how do you measure success in Social Media?
And I don’t mean by playing the game of “the new ROI or Risk of Ignoring.” No, I mean once you’ve jumped into the Social media pool how do you measure whether you’re creating waves or merely ripples?
7 Social Media Measures
1. Sales: It seems obvious, but perhaps not. If you are selling more stuff or getting more members was the increased activity after you first jumped into Social Media? Success is: Sales increasing independently of your traditional and other non-Social Media marketing efforts.
2. Opt-in e-mails: The most valuable asset any marketer or PR professional can have. These are people who want you to reach out to them. Success is: More people giving you their email addresses.
3. Time on site/Page-views per visit: It’s not enough to get people to your site, you need to keep them there. Success is: When your Web analytics show an increase in one or both of these scores.
4. Downloads: If you offer good stuff for free – White Papers, How To Guides and coupons, for example – people will come looking for you. Success is: Month over month you are getting more and more traffic to (and then downloads from your) Downloads page chances are your business is about to go crazy because people are finding you and finding value in you.
5. External links/External referring sites: If you are tracking how many sites link to you (and you should) you’ll want to see that number and the quality of those sites go up. This in turn helps with your SEO. Success is: When the number of external links builds exponentially and the referring site traffic also grows steadily.
6. Comments: This is one of the more social aspects of Social Media and whose value is often overlooked. Success is: Getting more and more people to engage on your blog or anywhere else you ask people to comment, rate or generally have an opinion.
7. Social Media metrics: By this I mean Facebook fans, Twitter followers, LinkedIn connections etc. These relationships all have value. Success is: A steady growth in the numbers of followers etc across platforms and the increasing flow of messages between you and your fans.
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Nice. I love "Success is"in 140 characters.
ReplyDeleteFor potential dropouts, "success is" the kids show up. Also referred to as "attendance rates."
It's a nice metric because most of the funding for a particular school is based on how many kids show up. Lots of time and energy is invested on "truancy." But the legacy system doesn't work. Attendance rates at the bottom of the pyramid remain intractably low. As might be expected there are any number of "blame the customer" explanations: "The kids lack ...."the parents don't . . . (fill in the blank."
In my opinion, the real reason is that bottom of the pyramid kids have a culture that allows them to do what many kids would do, vote with their feet by not showing up.
The under appreciated reality is that solving attendance at scale has little to do with "curriculum", "quality of teaching" etc. To be clear these are important issues going forward, but the speed of change required to implement is much too slow.
The other under appreciated reality is that almost every parent of every kid is highly motivated for their kids to "get an education." But unlike middle class parents, they don't have the time to monitor when jr acts like a jerk. Admins and teachers are much too busy to "contact the parents."
The kid plays hookey and tells mom, "Sure, I went to school." Mom doesn't find out the real story until it's much too late.
One solution is to send an SMS to mom by having the teacher click on an personalized 2d code printed on an attendance sheet. Personalized PDFs could be in the Cloud and printed out on Multi Function Printers in the school building.
The tech is well defined. Every digital global would love to figure out new uses for web connected copiers in the school building.
I'm retired, so all I can do is kibbutz, tweet and blog. But I am on the radar of a couple of folks who both have the tech and a business reason to deploy it. The trick now is to find evangelists on the ground who are willing to do a proof of concept.
If anything here is interesting, a DM would be the best way to get in touch.