While social media and the online medium offers marketers the benefit of measurability, the issue this throws up is also an information glut. Myra Gorostiaga, global social analytics lead for Lenovo talks to Marketing about effective social media measurement.
[More from Gorostiaga and other content marketing experts at Content 360. Join us on 8-9 April for two days packed with presentations, case studies and sharing on the future and challenges in Content Marketing.]
Marketing: What are the biggest social media measurement mistakes companies make? How has Lenovo avoided these mistakes?
Gorostiaga: Focusing on one metric, without the context of another. For example, you can choose to look at total volume of engagement to measure how well an activity on a social platform performed. The volume of engagement might tell you how responsive your audience was to your content, but without the context of reach you would not know the proportion of people exposed to the content that took action to engage. At Lenovo, we try not to focus on a single metric to measure success, rather we choose a mix of metrics to add context and tell a story.
Marketing: Surely most marketers realise that vanity metrics such as ‘likes’ and ‘followers’ have limited value. What is a better way of looking at it?
Gorostiaga: I do not believe that “likes” or “followers” should be completely discounted, depending on the maturity of your social presence. What is important is that marketers use it to supplement other measurements of success. Having a multitude of metrics at your disposal gives you the flexibility of aligning the right metrics for your business, but it can also be overwhelming. That being said, every company is different and marketers should first define their objectives for social media, and then map the appropriate metrics back to each goal.
Marketing: What key metrics does Lenovo track on the major social networks it is present on?
Gorostiaga: We look at four key areas on social: Participation (unique number of people interacting with our content), Acquisition (how much is our community growing), Retention (how many people are coming back frequently to interact with us), and Shareability (how many people are sharing our content with their own communities). This is what we call the PARS scoring system, as part of the Social Health Index. Through this, we are able to assess how our audience is responding to our content and how loyal our audience is. Moreover, we can pinpoint which areas of social we need to put more focus on, while also looking at how are our activities are making an impact on our overall social efforts.
Marketing: Is it worthwhile to attach a measure of financial value/return to social media investments?
Gorostiaga: If you are able to properly attach a financial value to your social measurements, then it is definitely worthwhile. The biggest challenge is how to track this successfully. If your company’s objectives are not just about generating leads, but also around building loyalty, or awareness, then the “return” on investment may not necessarily be a monetary figure.
Marketing:What advice can you give marketers who want to refine their social media measurement strategies?
Gorostiaga: You should start out by asking yourself a few questions:
1. Is your social media strategy aligned to your business objectives? If it is, then the metrics should easily fall in to place.
2. Do you have a complete view of your social performance across your key metrics and platforms? For Lenovo, it was essential for us to be able to benchmark our performance over time so that we could understand how we were improving and what was driving our successes.
3. Do you have the right tools to measure all your needs? At Lenovo we recognized the need for an online dashboard that would pull in all our social data as well as all our competitors’ data. This empowered us to make informed decisions, and track against the industry.
As the Global Social Analytics Lead for Lenovo I have to continually ask myself, “Am I supporting the business?” In an industry that is constantly changing, answering these questions has helped me formulate our measurement plan.
Marketing Magazine’s second annual Content 360 will be held on 8-9 April at the InterContinental Singapore. Hear from Gorostiaga and other senior marketers at the event. More details here.
To book your seats for the conference contact Joven Barcenas at jovenb@marketing-interactive.com or +65 6423 0329, +65 9820 5195.