Written on May 25th, 2011 by tasha
In my last blogpost I spoke about realistic expectations for social media success. Many people expect the moon from this new medium. Not gonna happen! And remember, social networking is NOT sales. But there are some reasonable outcomes to anticipate as a result of your social media endeavors. And they do contribute to your overall marketing mix in a way that can eventually impact revenues.
The most likely behaviors to impact with a social networking presence are:
- Getting people to sign up for your e-newsletter. “Harvesting” email addresses is a great outcome. It is a form of engagement that is definitely “further down the sales funnel.” With an email address you have more direct control about when you get your message to your viewer. (For example, with your e-newsletter, you arrive in their inbox once a month. With Facebook or Twitter, who knows when they check their newsfeed. But they probably check their email regularly.) You also can tailor your messages more specifically than you can on Facebook, Twitter or a blog.
- Driving traffic to your commercial website. Your social networking sites are for engaging, for educating and inspiring. You attract interested family members (generate leads) with content marketing. But the sales call-to-action (converting them to clients) as a general rule happens on your business website.
- Promoting events. If you are a non-profit, this may mean increased revenue in terms of fund-raising. It also means more community awareness and perhaps an expansion of the base of your “donor pyramid.” If you are a for profit business, community presentations and professional inservices are another form of content marketing. You are getting your name out there, and your personality. People make non-verbal assessments that can influence them very powerfully in your favor.
- Increasing the number of LIKES, or follows or subscribers. Now most people may be surprised that I didn’t list this first. Well, in and of itself, a quantity of LIKES is not all that useful.
LIKES do not equal LOVES. And just because someone LIKES your page does not mean that they are engaged with your company, or going to “convert” into a customer or someone who takes action that directly benefits your business, such as hiring you, donating to your cause, or signing up as a volunteer.
Using the language of sales, someone who LIKES you is a bit further down the “sales funnel” if they bother to click the LIKE button than if they don’t. But many people LIKE a site and never return again. The number of followers, therefore, measures your potential reach. It does not measure action or engagement.
What I really think makes for a meaningful metric of success is to look for QUALITY interactions. I would take a single high quality lead over many many LIKES.
So how do you measure the quality of your LIKES?
- Number of interactions (comments and shares). What makes social networking unique is the ability to carry on a public conversation with your fans and followers, and for them to actively share their interest in you. This is called “user-generated content” and is the holy grail of Web 2.0. Unfortunately, it is very difficult to get people to post comments and even harder to get them to post a “share.” This is especially true of the kinds of people who visit an elder care site. As a rule, your fans will be older and most likely less tech savvy. They aren’t as bodacious in their willingness to jump in and join the social media conversation. In addition, you as a business, are not likely to do or say the kinds of things that prompt people to make comments (i.e., publish inflammatory or controversial posts). While yes, it is delightful to get people to respond to your posts, I just don’t see it happening in the elder care world to the degree it is happening in other sectors. But don’t despair, there are other measures of quality engagement.
- Number of repeat visitors. Getting that initial visit (and LIKE) is good. Getting repeat visitors is better. Someone who returns to your site is beginning the Internet version of what sales people call “qualifying the prospect.” It shows that they are finding value in what you have to offer. They are beginning to develop brand loyalty. They actually, genuinely like you!
- Number of pages viewed per visit. Similar to repeat visitors, visitors who check out several pages at a single visit are more engaged than those who go to your Wall and then click off somewhere else. Investigating photo albums, reading notes, going to your info page, clicking on past blogposts…Every click within your site is like asking for another date. “I like what I see so far. I’m curious to learn more.” Analytics tools are available for each channel (e.g., “Insights” on Facebook). These can give you hard data such as number of pages, number of clicks, and in some instances, time spent on a page. (This latter, however, is not exactly indicative of real focus as the viewer may have gotten a phone call, taken off for lunch, or gone to the bathroom and just happened to be on your page when he or she left.)
- Emotional tenor of the comments. There are fancy services that actually evaluate and rate the emotional tone of the comments left on your site. If you are Intel or Comcast, this might be worthwhile. But for our purposes, your own overview of the types of comments that poeple post will be plenty good enough. Are people generally complaining about your services, or are they generally positive and thankful? Many businesses hesitate to get involved with social media as they are concerned about the ability of viewers to publicly post negative comments. In elder care, I don’t see that happening much. I taught a workshop on Facebook and hospice at the NHPCO conference last month. The class had many experienced social marketers in attendance and they confirmed that they rarely got negative comments. In fact, one early adopter said that over the last 3 years they had had only one negative comment, and over 300 positive comments. In that instance, they communicated privately with the person who had a complaint about their service and were able to resolve it to the point that the person even publicly posted that he/she was satisfied.
What have you been using to measure the success of your social media initiatives?
Posted in Blogging, Facebook, Social Networking, Twitter
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