What is your social ROI?
Our good friend Bosco Anthony gave a talk during Social Media Week Vancouver about Social Media Monitoring a few weeks ago. One of his key messages was that there are both quantitative and qualitative ways to measure your social media success and that you must be aware of both. Relying soley “on the numbers” does not tell your full story about your social engagement.

Examine your web traffic – Qualitative
A main focus of all of your social platforms should be to bring people to your website. You can measure which sites bring traffic to your website using Google Analytics. If you do not have Google Analytics installed on your website – GET IT. You will be able to see how much traffic comes to your website from your Twitter, Facebook and other platform pages on a daily, weekly and monthly basis with details about how long these visitors stay on your site and how many pages they visit.

You can also measure which of your specific tweets or posts bring the most traffic to your site. For Twitter posts you can do this by using a link shortener such as bit.ly, tiny url or the ow.ly used by Hootsuite and then tracking the link to see how many clicks it generates. We both use Hootsuite and like the ease of tracking Twitter links with it. For Facebook posts you can also use Hootsuite for posting. You can use the ow.ly link shortener and track your links.

Are your posts engaging? – Quantitative and Qualitative
Keep in mind that it is not the number of followers that you have on each platform that is most important. What is most important is how engaged these followers are and what actions they take on your posts. Engagement could mean a Re-tweet or an @reply on Twitter, a like, a share, a comment on Facebook or a re-pin on Pinterest. What posts get the most engagement? This is a quantitative measurement. You can track the engagement numbers of a specific post or tweet (number of likes, comments, shares re-tweets etc). This helps you to determine what time of day is best for you to post on each different platform. It also helps to tell you what content your followers find most engaging. And don’t forget about your blog. When a reader comments on a blog post written by you or your staff this is a form of engagement. 

Conversation
Were you able to generate a conversation with one or more of your followers because they liked or shared a post or commented on your blog? This is a qualitative measurement. If you can generate a conversation with one current or potential customer each day you are engaging in a way that you would not have before. Is the social sentiment good? Are your followers posting positive comments and feedback about your business? If so, this is feedback that gets out to more of your potential customers and is completely outside of your traditional advertising plan. It’s all about Engagement!

 

 Jeff & Tara Ciecko of CK Golf Solutions write two blogs on their website, one is there 19th Hole Blog where they share personal experiences and the Biz Blog where they share business best practices and golf industry related opinions. They have owned CK Golf Solutions for 5 years and provide marketing, social media and business services to the golf industry. 

  

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