Following on from yesterday’s post, on quantifying the value of social media, a couple of further thoughts.
Like any activity, it is crucial to undertake activity utilising social media in the context of achieving an objective, a commercial activity of any type is doomed to irrelevance without an objective against which to measure success, and learn how to improve.
Similarly, an effective plan requires that there be a logical, sequential series of activities that all play a role in the achievement of the objective articulated.
So, a three step process for achieving Social Media effectiveness:
- Acquisition. Where do yu expect the visitors to the activity to come from?
- Behavior. What do you want them to do while visiting?
- Outcome. What is the commercial outcome that you are looking for?
This this third leg, outcome, is the key one, and can be many things, but currently are usually centered around simple measures such as time on site, page visits, and purchase. However, these simple measures whilst useful ignore the power of the social media, its capacity to amplify a message, so a set of measures around the degree to which the message is “amplified” should be considered. The number of “likes”, comments, retweets, and similar measures of activity that “amplifies” a post are the real measure of social media effectiveness. This post by Avinash Kaushik, Google’s analytics guru offers some great thinking.
