Did you know that many companies have trouble measuring the actual value of their social media strategy? Getting an accurate ROI figure is not that difficult when you're using the right tools.
The minimal methodologies commonly used to evaluate the impact of social media campaigns in financial terms forces organizations to employ sub-optimal marketing strategies, wasting valuable resources. As a leading social media agency, we advise our clients that they could be using more effective strategies if they know how well their social media efforts are performing.
The essence of social media as a stage for consumer interactions and influence has a large direct impact on a brand’s communities. There are reasons for social media marketing to receive a higher response rate and client engagement compared with traditional marketing focusing only on the company-consumer relationship.
What are the Elements of Social Media Success?
By creating the right mix of marketing strategy, social media technology, and refined modeling, you will be able to experience and measure the success of marketing through social media. This combination will produce, improve, and spread the brand’s identity.
Also, the right approach will inspire a brand community association between consumers, while bringing the brand advocates to the forefront. The right approach will help you reach potential customers through the existing ones, and much faster than traditional word of mouth.
The key component is to relate common social media measures such as comments, shares, conversations, mentions, likes, and other social signals to financial metrics by analysis of the impact, and the role, of the influence in the purchase decision. It is up to the business marketing and social media strategy to use this analysis s to influence purchase decisions.
How to Measure the Buzz
Social metrics are used to demonstrate changes in buzz, which result from your social strategy, and the changes to monetary gain. This is accomplished by creating a CIE (Content, Interaction, Engagement) framework to help identify the effects of various members' influence impact through ‘word-of-mouth’ marketing.
This framework provides marketers a procedure to measure the viral effect of the generated word-of-mouth on social media, by measuring the weight of influence that each customer has in terms of the capability to spread word-of-mouth through various connections and networks.
You can also set up business profiles on most social media platforms, which will give you access to multiple analytics tools that are not available to the general public. The reports can track anything from unique post metrics, such as likes, shares, reach, and impressions, but also give you a snapshot of your audience and their activity dynamic.
What is the Fundamental Social Media Recipe?
The social media strategy consists of 3 phases:
1. The research stage, which is comprised of market research to get an appreciation for the possibilities of the particular social media penetration of the situation, and also, to identify the ideal social platform to use.
2. The pretest stage is when the flow of ‘word-of-mouth' and influence are both measured in reference to different message layouts to control for the effect of tone and natural language.
3. An implementation stage, which consists of multiple campaigns that are geared to stimulate ‘word-of-mouth’ and track resulting changes in sales.
In today's interconnected world, word of mouth has become the most powerful marketing tool. People trust recommendations from friends and family more than any advertising message.
Jeff Bezos, Founder and Former CEO of Amazon
How is Word of Mouth Measured
The Consumer Influence Effect measures the generated buzz, and Consumer Influence Value measures the monetary value of the influence for any given user.
To measure the impact of word-of-mouth in social media, it is important to understand and study how the information flows through the targeted network. This is done by calculating the Consumer Influence Effect of specific individual users. Then sales data describing the purchasing behavior of each user is combined with the Consumer Influence Effect metrics to obtain the Consumer Influence Value.
Analysis of Target Markets
The target market can be determined by an analysis of how many people are talking about a certain topic. The software that measures this can be customized to track your users' networks and the strength of their influence throughout all their social media channels.
The same software collects and archives conversations, positive or negative word of mouth, and it can be used on the social network related to any specified topic. The most important decision is to choose the right website development company to create your software for the right purpose.
What Should I Know About the Viral Effect?
It is important to consider that in most cases, users do not have a direct immediate association with each other; they're more commonly connected through 4 degrees of separation. These factors ensure that word of mouth does not get limited to specific groups within a small network.
The actual measure of ‘word-of-mouth’ is the number of times the message is passed on (degree), the number of connections that the message jumps (depth of influence), and the number of comments and replies received for each message (engagement impact).
The Consumer Influence Effect metric, as a standalone, can be used to quantitatively measure the degree to which messaging can spread from one specified user of social media. For example, marketers can strategically publish a YouTube video to a group of high ‘consumer influence effect’ consumers to increase the spread of the content in a specific period of time.
Another way to make your content go viral is by following social media trends that are created by high-ranking influencers. Research the music and mediums that they are using, stick to a similar posting schedule, and pay attention to how they curate the feed. Hopping on social media trends is the best way to maximize reach and organic engagement.
Once you identify the right influencer marketing program you can then generate the viral spread of the information you need. Just remember the data and analytics so that you can track the actual financial value of this influence.
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