Social Media: Measuring the Benefits

Lauren Fisher of Simply Zesty (pictured here) spoke to members of the  Dublin City Enterprise Network for Women back in February about how to measure the benefits from Social Media. Here, she shares some 'insider tips' with us.

During her well-attended presentation, Lauren talked about how social media should form part of a company’s overall marketing strategy as well as the need for tangible business benefits.

Here is a summary of Lauren’s presentation:
Social media is not about a presence on individual sites but about your overall integrated presence.   It is tempting to try to be active on a wide range of sites but you can spread your effort too thin.  

It is more about using social media to bring people to your website or blog.

It should form part of your overall marketing strategy. While marketing used to be about marketing to many, social media and the web allow you to market on a one to one basis.  

You need to give people a reason to love you!  As a business, people do not automatically want to have a relationship with you – you have to work on it.

Remember that Social Media allows you to make yourself stand out as being different.  Seth Godin’s book Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable was about getting yourself noticed.

How it works for your business:
You need tangible business benefits from your efforts, especially in recessionary times.  Ask yourself whether it is just a nice conversational tool for you or are you using it to grow your business?

She recommends that you don’t do anything until you know what you want from Social Media.  What are your objectives? 

For example:
    Raise your profile? With what group?
    Increase sales?
    Get email addresses?
    Get comments on your blog?

The next stage is to look at how to measure your results?

Do you want to raise your site visits?  Do you want to rank more highly on Google searches?

Are you or your sector being talked about?

You should google your brand name every day!  Check out what’s being said about you and your competition.  You should try to own every result on the page.

Anytime anyone types your brand name they are sending out a message about your business.  If there are negative comments, get involved .Explain why any problems existed and why things better now.

You can go to http://addictomatic.com/  This is a social media aggregator – you can search a term and it shows results across a wide range of media.

You can measure Social Media results at every stage, unlike traditional media such as television advertising where it is more difficult to assess and to change if it’s not working.  For example, if your blog isn’t driving sales or taking visitors to your website you can relook at it.

Avoid the feeling the feeling of “Have no idea how we’re doing”.  You can measure how you’re doing using some free tools:

www.trendistic.com    “Trendistic is a tool that allows you to track trends on Twitter, similarly to what Google Trends does for Google searches. It gathers tweets as they are posted, filters redundant ones and compiles the rest into one-hour intervals”. It shows the level of traffic and what people are saying on particular topics.
www.oneriot.com     “What's happening on the realtime web?” Not as accurate yet as Google but it allows you to see what people are saying right now.  You can search at different times during the day to see if it changes.  It can help you to decide whether you should be on Twitter or now.
www.blogpulse.com      “An automated trend discovery system for blogs. It analyzes and reports on daily activity in the blogosphere.” This is not as simple but is worth using.  You can find if you’re ever mentioned in a blog post.

Lauren gave an overview of two campaigns they did for Vodafone.
1.    Vodafone wanted Technology bloggers to talk about the launch of their 360 Launch.  They invited bloggers to a launch and tracked the coverage. They got much wider coverage as a result of targeting bloggers.
2.    They wanted to increase the reach of the “Cheer up your top up” campaign. They ran a photo competition (cheer up activities) on flickr/facebook.  It had a great response and some people made an effort to connect their entry with Vodafone’s logo, etc.  The business benefit was that the company’s image was enhanced.   


Conclusion

You should start off by writing down the answers to this question:  Why should I go into Social Media?
The most popular Social Networks in Ireland (in order of popularity) are
1.    Facebook
2.    Twitter (tends to be more tech savvy – are they your target audience?  It would be worthwhile doing searches on your product/sector to see if they are being mentioned.
3.    Bebo

With thanks to Lauren Fisher of Simply Zesty.

Network Members Darina Slattery  of Japan Ireland Travel (www.japanirelandtravel.ie) and Janie Lazar of Design Classics (www.designclassicsdirect.ie) took resource tables at the February meeting.

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