Where can you start to track communication through social media? The best way to start involves four elements which reflect the development of the relationship between the comms department and the audience:
1. Awareness measures initial exposure and engagement. How many friends and followers do you have? What's the volume of hits and clicks coming to your brand from media targeted at analysts? What's the search engine ranking? How often are you being mentioned by contacts, relative to others? How many positive mentions are you getting?
2. Conversation tracks active engagement in discussion about your market with you and your clients, starting with comments and reposts. How many are in conversation with you? Lots of people might mention or retweet you once, but how many people are coming back to discuss with you again and again?
3. Influence spots changes in what people do: It's about the impact of the programme. Did people who are following your social media activities start to mention your firm more frequently or more favourably than offline contacts? Are they meeting or contacting you more often? Do attitude surveys show that 'social' people are more likely to recommend you than others?
4. Leverage is how to make the most of social media coverage. Are you recirculating positive comments both internally and externally? Are you telling other colleagues and clients about the positive comments? Are you facilitating connections between clients or journalists and those positive people? What other ways do you develop for using the third-party credibility of comments in social media to boost your brand?
These indicators are mostly quantitative, which means that it's relatively easy to track and evaluate. Using applications like Google Analytics, Radian6 or Nielsen BuzzMetrics, you can easily measure the baseline and then track changes in traffic and relate them to specific campaigns. When it comes down to measuring change, the evaluation should be extended by a qualitative analysis tracking changes in the way analysts comment on certain topics, products or companies. The big advantage here is that usually there already exists a real world contact to the analysts and the dialogue will continue in the offline world, providing much deeper insights into the opinions - deeper than what can be extracted from the figures gathered via the mentioned online tools.
Thanks to Torsten Sewing for sharing these comments!
