Social media as a traffic source: it’s just Facebook and Twitter
Using audience and traffic as your way of measuring success may be a bit old fashioned. After all, in social media, it’s all about the relationships, not about unique visitors or pageviews. Then again, audience and traffic are the least “fuzzy” of social media metrics and their trends might teach you a lot about how your activities in the social media space are received.
Technorati's State of the Blogosphere is based on a survey of [mainly U.S.] 7,200 bloggers. Full presentation is embedded below, but this particular strike is interesting when you use traffic to your site as your main KPI:
4 good reasons to invest time, resources and money in social media
Below are my speaker slides for last week's Share Your Honey conference with Vlerick and InSites.
In short, there is one really bad reason to invest time, resources and money in social media:
- Technology, or "stepping into the geek trap". Unless your name is Wired Magazine, don't do the effort only because you think it's cool
Good reasons:
- To reflect your brand and its values in all of your social media assets
- To drive traffic to your website & build a bigger audience
- As a platform for Relationship Marketing
- For sales and lead generation (aka conversion)
Number of followers/friends: hardly the point in B2B
- hits/visits/pageviews
- repeat visits
- conversion rates (visitor->purchase)
- sales levels
- revenue per customer
- hits/visits/pageviews
- repeat visits
- conversion rates (visitor->purchase)
- number of follower/friends
- revenue per customer
- hits/visits/pageviews
- repeat visits
- number of follower/friends
- conversion rates (visitor->purchase)
- revenue per customer
- hits/visits/pageviews
- repeat visits
- conversion rates (visitor->purchase)
- number of follower/friends
- sales levels
- B2C Outpacing B2B in Social Measurement @ eMarketer.com
Awareness as a KPI: are you sure?
Mark Lester, Communications Planner at MEC in New York has an interesting view on the AIDA model (awareness - intrest - desire - action). According to Lester, the presumption that awareness necessarily converts into interest is flawed.
Key highlights from this presentation:
- Measuring persuasion should be almost universally preferred to awareness.
- Awareness can no longer be presumed to convert to interest/desire/action. The majority of studies show it’s statistical relationship to sales is in most cases, at best, weak.
- Neuroscience appears to explain the phenomenon that advertising can be effective without being remembered.
- A large body of research also shows that attitudes and behavior have a volatile relationship, challenging the validity of surveying as method.
- Alternatives need to be explored further, ensuring measured attitudes are as specific as possible may help to increase the correlation with a specific behavior in the meantime.
Sales main objective for companies to invest in social media
- Social media as customer service channel: $88k
- Social media for brand awareness: $53k
- Social media for sales: $50k
5 Common Social Media Marketing Mistakes
Bloomberg Businessweek sums up five of the most common mistakes of companies' social marketing and communications strategies.
In short:
- Not (or Barely) Monitoring - or worse: not having clear defined KPIs before you start
- Down-sourcing" to Interns or Junior Staff
- Fast Beats Perfect - or as the saying goes: Fast, Good or Cheap. Pick two.
- Faking It
- Having an "Off" Switch - or abusing social media just for campaign blasts
Further reading:
- Top Five Social Media Marketing Mistakes @ businessweek.com