A day in the life of social measurement.
Several times a day, industry experts tweet about the breaking news, insights, and cool tools on social media measurement. My colleagues curate and share countless pieces of content so that we have insights into the latest and greatest. To be honest I can’t carve out enough time to go through it all in detail. Like most time-starved folks, if the headline grabs my attention I click through, scroll down and scan for a great new nugget or two, then exit. One of the main reasons I can’t always consume content on social measurement is that I spend most of my time doing measurement. Take a prototypical Monday as a case in point:
8:00 am. Run SPI.
Traffic Analysis
Community A: Omniture feed shows that unique visitors increased. Analyze where they came from and what they did. The new banner ad caused a spike in traffic. So did the socialization of a Facebook post on the corporate page. Next key data points: how much time they spent on various pages and what content got the most love from visitors?
Community B: Google Analytics indicates that bounce rate decreased and time on site was up slightly. Tuesdays are the busiest. Make a note to post content late on Mondays to increase eyeballs. Idea Section got the most traction, which can be attributed to the new re-design and simplified layout that brought it front and center.
9:00 am.
Community Health and Performance
Community A: What’s the member conversion rate? Showing a steady uptick; not bad organic growth. Looks like our blog attracted some great comments from the members, but the latest forum post seems to be a non-starter; we need to recalibrate that one. Can I pinpoint all of the spikes and dips over time to specific engagement activities?
Community B: Log-ins increased this week and community generated answers were up. Flag this for the Support team. We could use more user generated content for the new product launch next week. Alert the Community Management team for direct outreach to our top performing members.
10:00 a.m. “To the cloud!”
Brand Awareness
Community A: What does the Sysomos report tell us? Did we move the needle? Check on the number of mentions and how our posts and tweets got socialized. Are we getting talked about by the right Influencers and how can we more deeply engage with them? Visit Social Mention.com to evaluate the network effect of our content amplification efforts during the latest campaign.
Community B: While checking my weekly Google Alerts for competitor info, hot topics and the latest news, I notice a good blog topic for the engagement calendar and pass along to the team. The BuzzMetrics report in my inbox shows that there are new additions to the list of key influencers (above average positive mentions). Determine action plan to nurture relationships.
11:00 am. Social Media Integration.
Community without Walls
Community A: Check Facebook Insights. Nice pop in number of likes, but only a few comments. The holiday weekend is coming up, so let’s swap something timely in and see if that sparks the conversation. Visited our advocate’s product review on YouTube – over 20,000 views, with likes and comments.
Community B: Check Twitter and for new activity. Healthy bump in new followers, must have been the targeted outreach from social media monitoring. Follow back. Reply to DM’s and log hash tags. We are driving traffic to and from this channel, and it is becoming a great awareness tool for us.
12:00 pm. Report.
Develop dashboards to show how our communities are performing against KPIs. Pull in all the information from SPI. Highlight the key drivers behind the data. Show what’s performing and what’s at risk. Provide recommendations on action items to address weak spots and leverage strengths.
Align data points to our business objectives. Traffic and share of voice are up, which means we are driving awareness. Engagement is improving, so we’re impacting brand loyalty and affinity. Answers submitted by the community have increased, which is directly reducing support costs. Product reviews have a broader reach, fueling consideration, preference and purchase.
1:00 pm. Lunch!
Scan the latest content on social media measurement to make sure we didn’t miss anything. Move on to the next ask of the day, Advocate Identification.
But before, I go….how do you measure?
Senior Consultant
Jenny is a digital content strategist, who leads customer-centric engagements that focus on understanding B2B buying behaviors and developing custom roadmaps.
Her expertise is creating buyer personas and mapping digital content journeys to assess the multi-channel user experience. She helps clients operationalize plans across workstreams and identifies processes to create efficiencies in marketing operations. Jenny also has extensive time under her belt developing and managing customer advocacy programs and community building.
She has helped a diverse group of organizations including Cisco, VMware, Verizon, Microsoft, Dell, BMO Harris, Capital One and many others become more customer-centric.