Measures

If you don’t Measure it, you can’t improve it. We are so early in the Social Media Marketing adoption curve, that the available tools and techniques are still evolving. However, there still needs to be a way to check your progress against your Objectives. 

Each Objective should have one or more quantifiable Measures that can be used to track whether you have achieved your Objectives or not. Measures are typically tracked against a specific baseline metric at a point in time. The key in setting up your Measures, is to make sure that you are able to attribute the data you are seeing to your Social Media Marketing activities. 

Tracking metrics and massaging data can be an extremely time consuming task. The more KPIs and metrics that you are Measuring, the more effort you need to budget for. So, if you are just starting out and experimenting, set a handful of goals and then iterate or expand them based on your experiences over time.

Examples

Objective: Increase Product Line Revenues

• Measure: Increase product line A revenues by 5% from customers sourced via social media
• Measure: Increase annual customer purchases of product line A  from 2x to 3x

Objective: Improve SEO : SEM ratios

• Measure: Increase inbound links 30%
• Measure: Decrease cost per customer acquisition to $100

Objective: Increase brand / product awareness

• Measure: Increase product reach by 10%
• Measure: Increase inbound links 30% [same measure can be used to validate more than one objective]
• Measure: Increase BuzzMetric  score 15%

Objective: Increase brand / product perception

• Measure: Increase product sentiment ratings 10%