Tasha Harrison

The Role of Social Media and How to Measure It

The key difficulty when trying to define the role of social media in your marketing is working out how to measure its success. It is relatively easy to measure some forms of marketing, such as pay per click advertising and banner advertising. Using Google analytics it is simple to see how many people who clicked on your advert bought something.

However, this is only part of the picture. You can’t measure the people who looked at your site, bookmarked it and then came back later. It is difficult to track the journey that person takes (you can of course install Spyware and scripts onto people’s computers, but that is a serious breach of their privacy).

Social media is a whole new challenge. You could measure it on how many people click through to your website or how many fans and followers you have or even interactions. In fact you’re probably measuring all three. The problem with this kind of measurement is that it doesn’t capture the entire picture of what’s going on. It also assumes that social media is like every other kind of advertising.

Social Media is About Building Lists

Social media is about building lists of loyal subscribers. This means that when you launch a new product or have a promotion you have a list of people ready to participate and help spread the word.

The downside of social media is that it takes time. It is important to never take your fans and followers for granted, to reward them regularly and, most importantly, treat them with respect. Reply to their comments, help them when they ask and don’t bombard them with information that is only about your company or product. Share fun articles, interesting information and informative videos about your industry.

The other important aspect of growing your following is to mention your social media sites on all of your other marketing materials. Don’t think that because someone clicks away from your website to your Facebook Page that you have lost a sale. You may have just gained a valuable follower who doesn’t want to buy at that exact moment, but wants to keep in touch with your company.

The Long Term Approach

Measure the success of your social media over a longer term, over a year or so. Look at how many interactions you are receiving and how many people are responding to your promotions. Also look at your overall online presence. How many links have you now got? How many people are searching for your company name on search engines? And how many times are you being talked about on blogs and in forums?

Once the two darlings of the web 2.0 world, Facebook and Digg, in their own ways, are demonstrating that this new world of media is not as lovely as many hoped it would be. The former is controlled and stifled by its owners, the latter by its users.

Facebook

When Facebook first began it was a way for people at University to keep in touch. Initially only available to Harvard students, it gradually expanded and in 2006 it was opened to everyone.

At first the site was a breadth of fresh air after MySpace became a horror of a social networking site. Users left in droves and discovered that all their friends were now on Facebook. For years people have happily uploaded all of their photos onto the site, detailed many personal aspects of their lives and generally used it as the online version of their life. (Within my own social circle every event and meet up is organised via Facebook.)

Then Facebook realised that they needed to make money to survive, just like every business. But this went against everything their users had bought into. And here lies the crux of the problem – how do they monetize the site without irritating and losing their users?

I wrote a post a few weeks ago about the changes Facebook have made to their pages, which sums a lot of what they’re getting wrong. They are trying too hard, making too many little changes and not addressing the key problems of privacy and advertsing.

Digg

Digg became popular due to its simplicity and ease of use. When I started using the site it was to find interesting and useful articles, about technology, politics, news etc. I discovered some brilliant sites, started to make friends who gave me brilliant recommendations via the ‘Shout’ function. It gave me the kind of optimistic love I now have for Twitter – it’s why people make the internet great. They build these fantastic social sites and fantastic people find them and create great content.

Now Digg has become just another place where social media super users and spammers control the content. The most popular things online are not necessarily the best – cats dancing, a panda sneezing etc etc. This has led to Digg becoming controlled by a few sites offering similar content. You can still find gems, but this shift in emphasis has meant that many of the users that made it great are now gone.

General Trend

The internet is at a tipping point. With so many people now on Facebook the potential control is scary and they are going to have to be even more careful now that their privacy is being scrutinised and users are losing patience. While sites that aggregate content are going to have to find ways to prevent super users driving away everyone else.

Social bookmarking is a way of sharing your favourite sites and pages on the internet with other people. It is a great way of finding new content as well. If you’ve never come across a social bookmarking site before, it is a bit like sharing your bookmarks with everyone and being able to search your friends’ bookmarks.

Below is a selection of the most popular social bookmarking sites

Delicious allows you to share your personal bookmarks with other users. You can organise and tag your bookmarks, making it easier for people to search through. It also makes it easier for you to find information amongst your own bookmarks. The actual site lists the hottest links, the one’s that are bookmarked by the most people, and the newest links. It is a great way to find new information, adding a new dimension to old school bookmarking and RSS feeds.

Stumble Upon takes social bookmarking to another level, where it is about purely sharing and finding information. The site itself describes it as channel surfing.  Stumble gives you sites based upon a list of categories you select. You simply click a button and it gives you a site, click again and another comes up. It is literally stumbling through the internet. You can then rate each site by clicking the thumbs up ‘I like it!’ or thumbs down if you disapprove.

Digg was once the most influential aggregator of news on the net. Users submit and rate links by ‘Digging’ them, clicking on a button with a thumbs up sign on it (a little like Stumble Upon). You can also make friends on the site, shouting out your favourite links and asking them to Digg those. The popularity of Digg has made it more difficult to find great content, especially since the content is controlled by a few super users. This has made the site less diverse.

Reddit is a cross between Delicious and Digg. For many people it has replaced Digg as a more diverse source of articles and information. Users rate articles in much the same way as Digg, and can also comment on each link. This gives it a community feel with better and more intelligent discussion – if that’s what you’re looking for!

The thing that makes Twitter so amazing isn’t Twitter itself, but the users. It is the users of Twitter that have made up many of the rules and multitude of applications.

Here are my top five applications:

1. Tweetdeck
   As a friend of mine put it, ‘So that’s what Twitter should look like’. It enables you to organise your followers into columns, so you no longer view everyone in one large stream. You can also manage multiple accounts, follow a particular hashtag and find and follow new Tweeps. It has the ability to integrate bit.ly, so you can monitor how many people are clicking on your links. (Also see Hootsuite, some people prefer it!)
2. Mr Tweet
   Discover new Tweeters and get new followers. This site sends you a regular update and helps build your network by recommending new people to follow. It also allows you to recommend your favourite Tweeps.
3. TweetEffect
   See your most effective Tweets, which helped you gain followers and which caused you to lose them.
4. WeFollow
   An excellently organised directory. Search by your industry or interest and find the most influencial Tweeps to follow.
5. Twitpic
   The easiest way to share pictures on Twitter. Upload your photo and it Tweets it to all your followers. It is also possible to integrate with Tweetdeck, so you only need to use one application.

Facebook have decided to take over the world. They watched Google do it and now they want a piece. They also watched Twitter rise from nothing and they want to reclaim their dominance.  If you are a Facebook user I’m sure you’ve noticed how many things have changed over the past year. It feels like everytime you get the hang of where everything is you have to learn it all over again.

Constantly Changing

In the more recent change I couldn’t find the pages I am a fan of. I could find groups and events, but I was having to search for each page separately. Eventually I found a list in my actual profile, under Info. How could Facebook have forgotten to make it easy for users to find pages?

Pages are essentially the way that Facebook could separate an ordinary user’s profile from a business or celebrity profile. This was great for businesses, because they now had much of the functionality of a group, but with their own profile. People became a ‘fan’, which enabled them to show their appreciation for a brand, while at the same time feeling like they belonged to the page.

I Don’t Want to Just ‘Like’ My Favourite Brands

In the most recent changes you no longer ‘Become a Fan’ of a page, but you ‘Like’ the page. Just as you ‘Like’ it when someone posts a picture of a cat standing on its hind legs. The sense of belonging is lost. Functionality is the same, syntax has ruined the effect.

These changes have made Facebook Pages, potentially a lot less effective. It makes it more difficult to give the impression of forming a longterm relationship with a brand. A user will still see updates in their news items, but I think they will be less inclined to contribute to the page, adding comments, photos and even video. ‘Like’ is a kind of take or leave it word, it has lost the emotion of ‘Fan’, it has ruined Facebook Pages.

Further reading:
Facebook Limits Fan Pages and Introduces Community Pages
Facebook Group vs Facebook Fan Page: What’s Better?