The new marketing medium – social media – has attracted many companies who want a new method to improve their branding and marketing. Social networks, blogs and micro blogs have won entrepreneurs’ trust and they now regard Facebook, Twitter and TechCrunch as the best marketing tools. The growing use of social media marketing strategies has brought about the need to measure their efficacy as well. Companies want to know whether or not SMM is effective for their business. Does it help them achieve their goals of effective brand awareness?

Social media is a relatively new media and its different tools and technologies have either recently come into the market or they are in the development stages. Because of this, different social media marketing strategies are new and not properly organized, which makes it difficult to measure their impact. The theme of a SMM campaign is “socialization” and it focuses on finding and connecting with the targeted audience, updating customers about the latest company products and services and, above all, increasing brand awareness and word-of-mouth buzz. It is difficult to measure the performance of a SMM strategy in a quantitative manner. However, different social media experts are working hard to define some parameters to measure the performance of a SMM campaign and develop an effective social media measurement.

Social media measurement is basically the tracking of various social media contents such as social networks, blogs, wikis and video sharing sites used by a company for marketing and advertisement. Measuring the results of social media is difficult and somehow ambiguous. Below is a list of parameters of an effective social media measurement. Businesses can develop an effective social media measurement on the basis of the following factors.

Visibility

It is the first checkpoint of a social media measurement. Social media is all about connecting to new people and letting them know about you. It aims to increase online presence and search visibility. To measure your visibility over the internet, collect statistics about the following factors and measure your online visibility.

• Number of hits to the site/blog
• Number of unique visitors coming to site/company’s Facebook page
• Search engine rank
• Message inclusion
• Share of online discussion
• · Net positive comments on blog/site/social networks

Engagement

Engagement is the main theme of a SMM campaign. Different social media tools like social networks and blogs focus on socialization and sharing. Therefore, the success of a social media marketing campaign depends on a high engagement ratio. To measure the engagement ratio, measure the following parameters.

• Click thru rate (CTR)
• Number of repeating visitors and repeating commenter(s)
• Number of subscribers to RSS feed
• Article/post readership
• Comments/post ratio

Influence

You have increased online presence. People frequently come and visit your site/blog/social network profile page. How much influence do you actually have? Do visitors talk about your products with their friends, colleagues and neighbors? The influence factor is measured on the basis of following parameters.

• Purchase consideration
• Change in awareness
• Association with brand
• Likelihood to recommend to friend

Action

The ultimate goal of every marketing campaign is increased sale and ROI. Therefore, action is the most important factor of an effective social media measurement. The “Action” factor is measured on the following points.

• Visit the stores
• Attend the events
• Tell a friend
• Buy the product

References:

Metricsman. (2008).A New Model for Social (and Traditional) Media Measurement. Retrieved Oct. 17^th, 2008 from http://metricsman.wordpress.com/2008/08/29/a-new-model-for-social-and-traditional-media-measurement/

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