Last week I attended a marketing conference hosted by Northwestern, where there is a panel on the topic of social media. During the 30 minutes, the discussion ranged from what is social media to how could marketers utilize social media, but still, missed the point that I really care about: how could companies measure the effectiveness of social media. Not until today, a friend kindly share with me an industry report, did I have some new thoughts on it.
First of all, why businesses need social media? Below diagram partly proves the importance of social media. I think for answering this questions, there are two types of companies’ advertising needs : One is for advertising on social media to increase brand awareness or drive sales, which is easy to measure. Another is for socializing with consumers to manage with a relationship, which is difficult to measure. However, there are much more reasons for a business to use social media besides advertising, such as listening to the market place and react, human resource purposes, etc..
How brands are discussed in the public
Consumers use social media to share feelings with their friends. Different from paid searches, which is known as “search for the right thing, at the right time”, social media doesn’t born with a strong “action-driven” nature. That is why reported CTR is always lower than paid searches. However, on the other hand, advertisements on gaming platforms to engage with consumers are proven to be quiet effective on some media, typically Face book, and this type of advertising is even more popular in Asia, though the measurement is more comprehensive than simple advertising. In terms of socializing with consumers, which is another major type of utilizing social media among business, always presented as a homepage on Face book, a channel on YouTube or an active account on twitter, for the purpose to influence brand reputation or increase brand awareness, really differs in the effectiveness among various marketers, where measurement needs to be played a key role here.
Spectrum of actions could take on social media
There are several vendors providing social media measurement tools. Radian 6 is a good example . Its application manages three different marketer’s needs, which is listening, measuring and engaging.
Listening: a brand isn’t just what the company says. It’s also about what employees, customers, prospects, competitors, and world at large say it is.A buzz metrics like below will take all the relevant keywords for a brand. So not only listen to your customers, listen to the world as a whole. A brand’s share holders are always more than you could think of, and social media do drives transparency out there.
Measuring：My key take-away from Radian 6’s measurement is the use of share of conversation and buzz lifecycle. Marketers are familiar with the term “share of voice”, but they may want to know, do share of voice generates compatible share of conversation in the market place? Share of conversation is how often your brand is discussed over the internet compared with your competitors, it could be case/event sensitive, but in the long run, it will be a fair measurement. Or we could think of it in another way, if a brand could generate a good share of conversation, is that necessary for the marketer to invest in a large advertising budget? Maybe yes, maybe not. A good example is iPhone in China, iphone has not been officially released in china, but the product sells itself without a penny of advertising budget, thousands of thousands people discussing it over the internet and trying to buy one from whatever channel they could get. This is a typical case of a successful brand with a large share of conversation but literally, no share of voice.
Buzz lifecycle tells marketers the influence of a topic of your brand, it could be the latest advertising campaign, or a new product just launched, enabling marketers has a better control and management over the buzz in the long run.
Buzz life cycle
As far as engagement, there is nothing new worth mentioning, it’s all about respond to the right customer, at the right time. A good example I recalled I read somewhere else could be Bing’s ” co-twitter” practice , Bing carefully follows the buzz on twitter and if there comes up a question or problem the person who responsible for the twitter account couldn’t answer, he or she will forward the question to other folks of the company to deal with. I think it is a mini example of integrated marketing communications from a company’s internal resource allocation.
Thare are other measurement tools out there too, I will discuss them in the future. Stay tuned ：）
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