Today people talk online, via social medial platforms, more than they do in real life. Now this presents a few questions to marketers as to how to use all the social medial platforms and how to measure its impact. Adam Singer from Google Analytics discussed about this issue when Hoot Suite Enterprise hosted him earlier this week. He gave a fresh insight on how marketers can measure impact for campaigns on social media platforms.
Till date performance indicator meant platform metrics. However, platform metrics could not be linked to sales. What can be gauged from platform metrics is the number of followers, likes, dislikes, comments, and fans. But the most important aspect, which determines ROI, revenue generation was not addressed. According to Adam, Google has two distinct solutions that drive up the performance thus increasing ROI, Google Analytics social reports and Google+.
He stressed that when you build and expand on your relationship base on Google+ you automatically improve your marketing plans. Marketers that use Google products have an advantage as Google+ is integrating all social which effectively increases engagement with targeted customers. This makes Google products more relevant and affords transparency to marketers on how their marketing dollars are spent. Google Analytics social reports allow marketers to tie the social media with the performance metric they care about. A few tips given by Adam are listed below.
- Identify things that you can measure and follow on them. You have to study all the channels and identify those that initiate specific actions and focus on them.
- Do not rely on benchmarks alone as they are not the same for different products, services, or industries.
- Social posts should be measurement oriented. Always include a call to action in such posts. This way you will be able to measure the impact.
- Treat different networks differently. In other words no two social networks are alike. Therefore what you post on one network may not be necessary on the other. Understand how the network works and then customize your posts accordingly.