Social Media Engagement Optimization and ROI
Applying media-style performance optimization to social media marketing.
Applying media-style performance optimization to social media marketing.
Everything we do in online marketing gets optimized. We optimize the performance of our media campaigns using the tracking from Dart and Mediaplex, we optimize the performance of our e-mail open and click rates from our list server’s tracking system, and of course we utilize search engine optimization and track the results with rank checkers and our Web analytics applications like Google Analytics, NetInsight, and Omniture.
Currently, much of the online marketing world is engaged in this never-ending symphony of wall posts, tweets, blog posts, and activities that fill the constellation of social media sites with their chatter hoping it gets traction with their target consumers. We push our streams of content and dialogue in the hopes that it goes viral, gets retweeted, generates comments, encourages likes, drives social connections (friends, fans, followers), increases the buzz, and ultimately drives more site traffic and revenue into our organizations. The funny thing here is I have never seen so much attention and time put into any kind of marketing activity where meaningful tracking and optimization was so completely ignored. I say meaningful because I really put very limited value on buzz – buzz doesn’t equal revenue – revenue equals revenue.
I’ve written before about tracking social media the way we track everything else we do online. (Check out my column, Online Media Tracking Methodology for Social Media.) Meaningful tracking in social media means looking at the same success metrics we examine when we spend money on online media – impressions and media value, high value engagements, clicks, leads, and revenue. (Of course, we can look at reach and frequency, but let’s not go there for now and take a more direct marketing approach to this.)
Tracking is very critical and at least at our shop we’re able to track social media ROI (define) with the same level of end-to-end visibility most people apply to online media and paid search. In other words, we’re tracking social media activity from impression to conversion and beyond. So let’s explore going beyond the tracking to the point where we’re actually doing something with the data. Let’s talk about optimizing social media engagement and ROI. In marketing, data is only as good as your ability to take action against it, right? So how about optimizing all the benefit of those tweets, wall posts, blog posts, and other ongoing activities – to figure out what works just like we do with everything else we put our time and marketing budgets against.
So, do you “optimize” social media marketing the way we optimize the performance media or paid search? Well, first you must decide what you want people to do, and then choose a couple things to measure that success. For example, let’s look at a few metrics, their possible data, and some actions you can put against them.
So, the big point of this column – don’t just track social media data and actions. Analyze and optimize them just like you do with online media, search, and e-mail!