9 Ways to Measure Your Brand’s Social Media Health

Thanks to the variety of social media marketing tools available today, there is a nearly endless stream of data available to marketers. That could make it tough to determine what metrics actually matter for your campaign or brand and why.

Here are nine key performance indicators and explanations for why they might matter to your brand.

1. Share of Voice: The number of mentions of your brand versus competing brands on the social web.

Why You Should Care: Your Share of Voice can be a good indicator of the consumer awareness of your brand as compared to your competitive set. It essentially shows how much of the social conversation your brand has earned or is currently earning.

2. Brand Volume: The total number of brand mentions over a given period of time.

Why You Should Care: If this number isn’t growing, your campaign probably isn’t working. Tracking brand volume week-over-week and month-over-month can be a good way to measure the overall health of your social presence.

3. Engagement: The overall number of times a user talks to your brand on social sites.

Why You Should Care: You can push out all the content in the world, but if no one cares to reply or discuss then what’s the point? Social media is a conversation, after all. The more highly engaged your followers and fans are, the more likely they are to be brand-loyalists, or become influencers and evangelize your products or services on their own personal networks.

4. Interaction Per Post: The number of replies or comments you receive on a given post, tweet, or update.

Why You Should Care: Similar to the engagement metric, the more times a user makes the effort to comment or reply, the more likely it is that they will grow to care about your brand and what you have to say.

5. Sentiment Analysis: The process of determining how the people who talk about your brand on social media actually feel about your brand, products, or company.

Why You Should Care: Although P.T. Barnum famously said, “All publicity is good publicity,” it’s an obvious problem if your brand is consistently being trashed on social media. Also, if the sentiment is mostly neutral, that could be a sign your marketing is not making a big enough impact, and no one cares enough to have a strong opinion either positively or negatively.

6. Social Click-Through Rate: The number of times a user clicks on a link to one of your owned web properties shared via social media.

Why You Should Care: Typically, one of the goals of a social media campaign is to drive traffic to a brand’s website, microsite, or other owned media, thereby creating consumer awareness and subsequently sales or conversions. The growth in the number of clickthroughs can be one of the indicators of a successful, engaging campaign.

7. Key Influencer Mentions: The number of mentions by users you’ve designated as “key influencers” due to their substantial and loyal social media following.

Why You Should Care: Having influencers discuss your brand and serve as a brand ambassador is an extremely powerful way to organically extend your reach within key communities. While having anyone mention your brand on social media can be proof your tactics are working, mentions by key influencers are considered more valuable since they have a deeper reach or more pull/influence with your target demographic or communities.

8. Platform Reach: The number of social platforms that your brand appears on, or the social “reach” across various online networks.

Why You Should Care: Your brand might be a hot topic of discussion on various forums, but your Twitter mentions are low. Whether or not this is a problem depends on the social networks your targets actually use. After all, having a popular Pinterest page, which has a predominantly female user-base, doesn’t really help if your brand is trying to target teenage males.

9. Mobile Mentions: The number of mentions of a brand on mobile social sites.

Why You Should Care: Social media is an increasingly mobile form of communication, and posting updates while on the go is quickly becoming part of nearly everyone’s lifestyle, thanks to smartphones and tablets. If consumers aren’t bringing your brand with them via mobile apps, this could be a sign you are getting left behind. It is especially important if your campaign involves mobile coupons, QR codes, or anything else that’s tied into the Android, iPhone, Blackberry, or Windows phone operating systems.

Even with all these metrics, it is important to remember that there is no magic formula that will simply turn your social media marketing efforts into dollars. The social realm is and always will be a rapidly evolving marketplace of information. What all marketers know is that people want to talk candidly and honestly about their experiences with a brand’s services and products, they want to hear directly from the voices of brands themselves, and that they will use multiple public channels to do so.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, pressureUSA

 

via [http://mashable.com]

Social Media – A History: Infographic

Social Media – A History (Infographic) was designed by KarimDesigns.com for Cendrine Marrouat

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Don’t Bother with Instagram; Here are Five Better Alternatives for Android

I’ll come right out and say it: I’m not a big fan of Instagram. And no, it’s not because iOS users have had their underpants in a wad over the Android release, but because for me, it really doesn’t live up to the hype. Here’s why, and more importantly, here are some just-as-good alternatives for Android users (and some for iOS users too!) who want to take and share photos with or without those filters that make a 5-megapixel cell phone camera look like a 70s Polaroid.

Why I Have No Love for Instagram

Here’s the thing—putting aside the fact that some very vocal iOS users are very upset that their precious app has descended to the likes of Android users (let’s be clear, some iOS users, not all – most people understand that the device you use, OS you prefer, or browser you surf with is not who you are) and the social commentary the whole depressing fiasco gives us, the truth is that while Instagram has great hype, slick sex appeal, and a bolted-on social aspect, it doesn’t do anything that a half-dozen other apps for iOS and Android don’t do. In fact, some of those Android apps do it just as well or better.

Instagram’s real appeal is the closed nature of its product—the fact that it’s walled off by default, with no open browsing of user photos by just anyone, and before its Android release, built a brand off of being iPhone only, private, and that thing that a select few used to take photos on their phone and then, for fear that no one would see it, pushed it over to Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Flickr, or anywhere else that people actually hang out. Aside from design and marketing, there’s little that makes the app special to this writer. (Your view may differ, and if so, that’s cool. You should use Instagram!)

That said, it’s good at what it does, the product is sound, it’s the aura around it that’s misplaced. That and the fact that it’s been dangled in front of Android users for far too long only to culminate in an arguably unfinished version (no tilt-shift? really?) when it was teased as “in some ways, it’s better than our iOS app,” according to one of the app’s founders. Combine the aura that and the fact that so many iOS users don’t want you playing in their sandbox anyway and it’s worth looking at some alternatives.

 

Why saying hello to social media in 2012 isn’t for everyone

Social media is a little bit like New Year’s Eve. No one can decide where they want to spend the night, but once someone picks a bar (or club), everyone quickly decides they want to go to that bar, too.

But why do they want to go to that bar? Because that is where everyone else is hanging out, so it makes sense, right?

Not really.

HOW TO: Increase Your Klout Score

By: Garin Kilpatrick

Klout has netted two rounds of investment totaling $10 million, which is why I am surprised that their site has been a bit glitchy for me to use.

Despite the glitches in the past I find that Klout is working great now and has given me a few different ways to re-discover people in my network and increase my influence.

My Klout score is 72 and Klout calls me a “Thought Leader,” which is cool.  At first I thought 72 was a low score, but then when I compared my score to some business leaders I was surprised to find that most people on my twitter list of influential people scored lower than me.

I saw a tweet from Jay Goldman several months ago complimenting the fact that more and more digital professionals are including their Klout score on their resume.  Turns out your Klout score can help you net a job!

Since Klout claims to be the standard for influence I thought it would be interesting to see how some of the people from my Twitter influencers list stacked up.

The first surprising Klout score I found was from Twitter co-founder @ev.  Despite having almost 1.4 million followers Evan is still six points behind me.

Evan has 6,300+ tweets compared to my 8,800+.  The difference between us is that I probably have more retweets, since I position my tweets and content for maximum retweetability, whereas Evan is probably not trying to get as many retweets as possible.

Social Media-Inspired Cocktails

photo by Hyperallergic’s editor Hrag Vartanian.