Social Media Success - How to measure the success of your SM strategy

The PR industry continues to look for a reliable way to measure social media ROI - they know they have to be there but where do all the hours go and was it all worth it?

One clearcut metric is viewer stats (of tweets, video, press releases, diggs, etc) - they are a surefire indicator of the popularity of a topic. But even without a lot of 'thumbs-up' on DIGG.com, you can still get to the top of Google Search for major, 'expensive' keywords. So views on a single website don't tell anything like the whole story.

A large percentage of tweets (more than 60%) contain brand names so you can also begin to measure online reputation and impact: analyse positive, negative and neutral mentions.

Here's a handy checklist from Ogilvy PR that might help you put together an ROI chart:

Blogs & Microblogs

• Number of inbound links
• Frequency/timeliness of posts
• Foll owers & subscribers
• Number and content of comments
• Affiliation of author
• Search engine visibility
• Traffic
• RSS feed subscriptions
  
  

Videos & Photo Communities

• Number of views and downloads
• Number and content of comments
• Ratings/peer assessment
• Relevant groups
• Number of subscribers
• Number of inbound links
  
  

Message Boards & Forums

• Breadth of boards
• Quantity and timeliness of activity
• Search engine visibility
• Affiliation
• Membership numbers
• Traffic
  
  

Social Networks

• Membership numbers
• Types of community features present (eg, profiles, blogs, video, message boards)
• Activity level on features
• Affiliation
• Search engine visibility

How To Measure Social Media ROI - Case Study

Here's a Social Media Measurement Case Study from an Australian mobile game and application development company, Champagne For the Ladies.

Case Study: Champagne for the Ladies | Press Release: Coolest Girl In School

Champagne for the Ladies used NewsMaker to publish and distribute a press release about the company's new mobile game for girls, Coolest Girl In School, achieving outstanding results in both traditional and online media.

• After 24 hours and dozens of interviews, Coolest Girl In School had extensive coverage in traditional media like the Daily Telegraph, The Age, The Adelaide Advertiser, Channel 7, and several talkback radio segments, including Sydney's premier talkback station, 2UE.
• More importantly Coolest Girl In School also received global media attention as the press release was Google indexed and widely available for creators of online social media.
• Coolest Girl In School featured in full page reviews in three of the world's top games websites and took prime position in industry blogs, general gaming blogs, mobile blogs and forums with readership in target markets. The story also featured in online news sites in the US, the UK, Canada, Russia, India, Thailand and Spain.
• Coolest Girl In School was such a hit story globally that it featured on the front page of DIGG.

CEO, Holly Owen said:

"Because of the online coverage we received, Coolest Girl In School also gained traditional coverage in areas of the globe where I have no media contacts. I was a guest on Canada's most popular talkback radio show, and featured in newspapers like the Toronto Star and on Spanish news...

"Because my credibility as a game developer grew globally through the coverage... particularly the in-depth interviews conducted by industry leaders, I was also contacted directly by venture capitalists in Silicon Valley who had read about my game 'all over the net.' I could go on forever about how using NewsMaker transformed my business...

"From start to finish the whole process including writing and editing my release took me under two hours, involved no faxing and cost me under $100. Usually I spend four times that amount in my time alone."

Here's just some of the coverage - this does not include the large amount of material that doesn't show in online search results. The release was also published by Google News, Wotnews, Yahoo and other major aggregators and is still being picked up today, more than a year later. To see the coverage, please follow this link.

Article credit

This article was provided to justweb™ by Leila Henderson, Managing Editor, NewsMaker. To submit a free press release, click the banner below:



  

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