Scratching your head to figure out how to measure social media’s revenue impact? You’re not alone. High-level stats may look like this:
Twitter: Following 46/Followers 153
Facebook Group: Fans 80**
LinkedIn Group: Members 68
SMS Subscribers: 24
Newsletter Subscribers: 623
What do they really mean? Our numbers (above) compare favorable to others our size, I think. Actually, I don’t really know what the competition is doing, or if that’s the right measuring stick for our efforts. We don’t approach this in a keeping-up-with-the-Joneses way. Our measure so far is on quality. People that follow us, are fans, are members or subscribers appear to be really, really smart.
As a small organization we can follow a prospect through our social media pipeline through to sale, but we have a harder time quantifying the sunk costs of getting them there. We can only imagine the complexity of a larger organization’s social media efforts. It seems obvious to us that social media is about small, highly interactive groups. So maybe corporate marketing shouldn’t only the social media face of the company. Maybe it’s the local franchisee, the product manager, or the field marketer. I don’t think anyone has all the answers yet. If you come across someone that does, be suspicious, very suspicious.
We’ve taken a goal-based approach that walks the line between strategy and necessity. Much of our social media experience/experiment seeks to prove out different strategies before we suggest solutions to our clients. We practice what we preach. We also need to be in the space out of necessity. Each day social media encroaches on marketing budgets and spend, taking time and attention away from quantifiable marketing efforts.
You can do both and should. Pull together a strategy that closes the loop from direct outbound to social media inbound to quantifiable results. Pull together small teams and micro-campaigns to leverage social media, because the life-cycle of a advertising campaign is shrinking.
(We’ll take a closer look at the public’s attention span next week after the holiday, because people have shorter attention spans going into a three-day holiday.)
**Finally, we need 20 more fans to reach a 100 in Facebook. Why is this important? It takes one hundred fans to earn your way into a vanity URL for your group. Vanity URLs, custom tabs and fb applications are another reason we should be excitedly cautious about the evolved Internet today. Thanks for that little bit of advice @alexrudloff.
