Loopholes to avoid when measuring performance of your Social Media Marketing Strategy

A marketing campaign as part of a business process needs to be measured. It is easy to measure performance in conventional marketing methods. However when it comes to Social Media it is still hazy to attach costs to activities and apportion results to specific actions. There are various tools and applications that can be used, but there is still debate whether what they measure is a true reflection of a return on investment of a social media campaign. Campaigns can never be similar. Objectives and results will always differ. Target audience also differs even though we may be using the same forum. With a clear strategy it is possible to identify performance measures for our Social Media Campaigns. Activity in Social Forums, may tempt us to view popular campaigns as successful. But what is success for one campaign might not be considered such for another. There are two types of popular campaigns that we need to be aware of and how they can or should affect/influence our campaigns.

Firstly we have viral marketing campaign. In Social Media, a viral campaign is one that has almost everyone sharing it.  They fall in love with the campaign and are motivated to share it with the next person. The campaign is extensively shared at not extra cost to us. Sharing of company information is good for brand awareness. However the reason this information is being shared might not be in sync with our marketing objectives. Yes, we want as many to know about us, but we just being known, is no assurance for a competitive advantage. We can only attain the competitive advantage if the objectives of our campaign are met.  A wrong interpretation of the popularity of a campaign, might lead us to conclude that we are successful when in actual fact, those sharing our information might never be converted into actual or potential future sales. I am reminded of the ALS Ice Water Bucket Challenge that once went viral. The originators of the concept, wanted to raise awareness on people living with the ALS condition and also to fund raise. I had close to 100 followers on Facebook that I saw participating in the challenge. Of all of them, there is only one who donated to the ALS foundation. The rest just did the exercise for fun or for its popularity. Partly the managed to raise awareness but I am not sure if the fundraising objective was met.

Secondly we have trending topics. Trending is a buzz word for popular topics mainly on Twitter but also applicable across all other Social Media Forums. Twitter has a column on the left side of its main page where it shows trending topics. Whilst it is possible to have our campaign trend and even appear on the front page of twitter, this might not help us meet our objectives.  Recently we had the official opposition party in South Africa run a campaign to promote their newly elected leader. He is a young vibrant man and CNN actually called the "Obama of Soweto" referring to his home area. The campaign #askmmusi was meant to get ideas from South Africans on their expectations on their new leader. That the topic was trending confirms that their brand got a boost. However whether their objectives were met might remain debatable. The interesting questions that came out of the campaign which received a lot of attention, had little to do a political leader. So if we use the matrix that the campaign was trending to measure the success of this Social Media Campaign, we might mislead ourselves.

Trending and Viral marketing can not be used as performance measures in our Social Media Marketing Strategy. But we can not ignore them. We actually need to build our campaigns around them because they give us insights into what our potential market is interested in. Should we have a campaign that trends or goes viral, we need to identify opportunities that we can capitalize on. Attention on its own will not lead to a competitive advantage.

How are you measuring your performance in Social Media Marketing? You can share with your valued comments below. Should you be in need of assistance in this regard, we are more than willing to assist.