How much do people pay for social media monitoring tools?
- 54.7% pays $100/month or less
- 19.7% pays between $100 and $500/month
- 19% pays between $500 and $5,000/month
- 4.4% pays between $5,000 and $10,000/month
- 2.2% say they spend $10,000/month or more
Based on a survey collecting data from 150 U.S. social media professionals, conducted by "social business software hub" oneforty.
More where this came from: All about social media monitoring tools infograph.
Cheat sheet for social media objectives
Marketing professionals will invest more in social media this year than ever before, yet this is a scene that constantly shifts and changes. Here to help you better leverage these major social media sites is CMO.com's 2nd annual guide to the social landscape - updated and revised for 2011. The four objectives are still the same:
- Customer communication (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr)
- Brand exposure (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Digg, Tumblr)
- Traffic to your site (Digg, StumbleUpon)
- SEO (Flickr, YouTube, Digg, StumbleUpon, Tumblr)
Case: Dell adapting to the importance of active listening
From socialbrands100.com:
We all remember the ‘Dell Hell’ of 2005, where journalist and blogger Jeff Jarvis vented about his frustrating dealings with Dell on his blog. This sparked a ‘blog storm’ as Dell consumers with similar frustrations linked to Jarvis’ blog, which eventually received widespread press coverage.
In a 2007 BusinessWeek article ‘Dell learns to listen’ Jarvis visits Dell and spends time with CEO Michael Dell to take stock of the company’s efforts in engaging with its consumers and the wider community. He opens the article with the statement that ‘[i]n the age of customers empowered by blogs and social media, Dell has leapt from worst to first’.
The Social Brands 100 was compiled over a period of three months with the contribution of an external panel of social experts drawn from business, academia, media and communications, and Brandwatch, the social media analytics data provider.
- Download the Social Brands 100 report (3MB)
- Download the ranking (3MB)
- Download average sector score (3MB)
- Download by sector (3MB)
Social media metrics: how do you measure social media success?
On 4 February, I was one of the speakers at the Webvertising Forum in Brussels. In my 20 minute talk, I tried to answer questions like:
- What are possible objectives for social media efforts?
- How do you measure success?
- What tools can you use to measure?
Afterwards I was interviewed by Best Of Publishing. The two questions are:
- How do you measure social media?
- What are the two biggest digital trends to watch in 2011?
Tim Ferriss: stop wasting money on vanity metrics
“Listening” isn’t enough. Tracking the number of Twitter mentions tells you nothing. The bigger question is: What are we trying to build or accomplish, and how will we digest and use this data?
- YouTube Beats Yahoo — Video Will Convert
- The Full Resurrection of E-mail: e-mail addresses are a safer long-term investment than social media features
- Large Companies Will Waste Money on Vanity Metrics: impressions, page views, and undefined terms like “engagement” are at best gameable and at worst meaningless.
- Ads & Conversation Will Impact Different Conversion Rates. One good test of whether your advertising can become a conversation: Would people notice if your ads stopped running? Clickthrough rate is not going to answer that question.
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)
Tracking social media metrics: what should you measure?
As companies continue to experiment with social media measurement, some are reveling the data, while others question if it's worth the investment. Watch as a handful of brand marketers discuss what tools they are using and how useful social media measurement is to them.
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.