HOW TO MEASURE SOCIAL MEDIA PRESENCE

How to measure presence in social media is a hot topic. For two reasons, because companies are starting to invest in building their presence in social media and because they want to know what effect these media have.

The main problem we face when we talk about social media marketing is that we don't know what we need to measure, and as always for lack of goals. The first step is to create a Social Media Marketing Plan, and it is essential. Well-defined goals (long, medium and short term) will allow us to create indices to measure success. They should:

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- Identify marketing objectives

- Choose the measurement categories inherent to such goals

- Find ways to draw these metrics in the social technologies they are using

MOST SOCIAL MEDIA INITIATIVES TARGET ONE OF FIVE VALUES:

- Listen: Understanding your customers and knowing what they say about your company

- Discussion: Many consumers pass the message to the company.

- Food: Also called viral or word-ear. Allows customers to meet their enthusiasts and convey the message to their acquaintances.

- Support: Focus on the quality of participation and impact for the user. Quality of customer service that exist between each other and the impact of how it affects your table.

- Participate: Focus on the quality of participation. How customers' ideas can change our products and services and our own corporate strategy.

The act of measuring the return on social networks only makes sense and works when an efficient planning has been done, prior to the actions.

It is the only way to know if the communication objectives have been achieved, because each objective requires a special measure. Numbers do not always portray results. When the intention is to influence opinion makers, qualitative analysis is the most appropriate.

As such a new activity, there are still no “standardized” aspects to give us a hand. However, here we are going to offer some help in getting started with consolidating information.

CHOOSE A GOOD TOOL

There are many tools to measure the online presence of a company or a brand. On the social network, which is another matter, we can talk some other time. The first question that arises when having to collect information from our networks is: free tool, or payment tool?

Of course, the answer to this first question depends on our resources. But beware, because a tool is free, it doesn't mean it's bad, or have the basic functionality we serve. On the contrary, many of the tools that exist are free (although some have payment capabilities for large companies).

CONSOLIDATE YOUR INFORMATION

Once you've decided which tool to use, it's important to start consolidating your information. It can be for periods of time (eg to last two weeks or last month) depending on what your needs are and what requirements you might have for your customers.

There are many ways to do this, but the best one is, in my opinion, Excel. To organize the information, and if we have relatively advanced knowledge of Excel, we can build models with formulas that allow us to “lift” the information downloaded from different tools and have them available whenever we want.

THINK ABOUT THE FUTURE

Chances are we have to repeat this procedure as often as necessary. So, if we see that the report is taking too long to complete, or that the information will not be consistent in the following months, it is best to rethink some steps .