Archive for measurement
3 Simple Ways to Measure Your Social Media Results
3 Ways to Grow an Instagram Community
Is your business effectively using Instagram?
Are you making the most of your community on Instagram?
Forty percent of top brands have adopted Instagram as part of their marketing strategy.
Instagram helps give your business a personal touch through visuals, so it’s important to bolster your community as best you can for continued growth and interaction from your audience.
Here are three tips on how to strengthen your community management efforts on Instagram.
#1: Use Tools to Manage Your Account
Instagram’s interface, whether on mobile or web, doesn’t offer the best options for brands to effectively engage with their community. Before the launch of the web version of Instagram, many tools were developed to fill in the gaps left by the network.
There’s Statigram, Instagrid, Webstagram, Nitrogram, Simply Measured and many other helpful tools for making the most of your Instagram community.
Let’s focus on just two, Statigram for community and giveaway management, and Nitrogram for measurement.
Statigram
Statigram is most helpful to monitor your community and engage in a variety of ways. The tool allows you to view your Instagram photos and feed, track the metrics of your account, host contests and respond to comments from your audience.
View and reply to all of your comments on your Instagram photos from Statigram. Each photo lists unread comments awaiting moderation.
It lets you quickly scroll through your photos to check which comments are unread, giving you the opportunity to read, respond to or remove them right from the Statigram platform.
Hosting contests is an important way to build your community on any platform, and doing so on Statigram can help quickly grow your relevant Instagram following.
When you host a contest or giveaway on Statigram, you’re able to have a landing page for your promotion, promote it on Statigram and monitor its success with extensive metrics. Statigram also allows a business to announce the winner of an Instagram contest hosted on their platform.
Having a landing page for your Instagram contest is important, mostly because it allows you to list the official rules of the promotion that your followers must adhere to.
Martha Stewart hosted her Instagram contest on Statigram to ensure the rules were clear and to ensure the initiative got the most possible visibility.
Martha Stewart is hosting an Instagram contest on Statigram, calling for users to share their holiday decor with the hashtag #marthastwartholiday for a chance to win limited edition ornament sets. This brand promotion would have been difficult to measure and manage properly without Statigram.
Statigram is a turnkey solution for managing your Instagram account and improving its relevancy with your audience.
Nitrogram
Nitrogram‘s main purpose is to effectively measure Instagram accounts—mostly the use of hashtags surrounding your business. Many tools focus on the followers of the account, but it’s always more important to dive into how your audience is engaging with your content.
Nitrogram's graphs are simple visual representations of the data from your account, including photos taken, likes, comments and potential impressions. All of this data is exportable to Excel.
Measuring the hashtags related to your business is important because it allows you to see the number of people posting photos about your company from their own accounts and at what frequency.
Your community is an important indicator of customer satisfaction and brand appeal when it comes to the uploads of their own photos, which are a different data set from the content your company uploads to Instagram itself.
#2: Respond to Comments to Grow Your Community
The most important thing you can do for your Instagram community is to remain active, engaged and provide value by responding to comments.
There are 81 comments on Instagram posted every second (according to Digital Buzz), which is a lot of comments to keep up with. That’s where the tools discussed above can really come in handy to bolster your community outreach efforts.
ModCloth monitors their community on Instagram by responding to compliments and questions and chiming into conversations with valuable insights.
Monitor your hashtags and the photos shared from your account for feedback from your audience. Respond to comments in a timely fashion, and always aim to add value to the conversation so your follower walks away feeling connected with and respected by your brand.
When you answer questions and respond to comments, you will help build a loyal audience, and also help give your account more visibility on Instagram.
If your photos appear on the Explore page—dedicated to the most interesting photos on Instagram—they’ll be seen by users outside of your following and thus provide a new level of visibility to your account.
Instagram's Explore page allows for the discovery of new images on the network, giving businesses the opportunity to grow their following dramatically once they get a photo featured on this page.
An Instagram photo makes it to the Explore page through a combination of two factors: the amount of engagement on that photo in likes and comments, and the amount of time it takes to get that engagement from when the photo was posted.
When you actively comment on your photos to incite engaging conversations, you help increase the amount of comments on your photo. This leads to a higher likelihood your photo will make it onto the Explore page and gain more followers for your account.
#3: Use Hashtags to Track Engagement Over Time
Hashtags are an often-overlooked way to monitor and measure the growth of your community over time. Similar to their use on Twitter and Google+, hashtags help aggregate photos of a particular subject based on the words used in the hashtag.
It’s important to look at the number of photos being uploaded about your brand to measure its growth over time, as well as your audience’s impression of your business.
Use the Explore tab to search and view all photos uploaded with a particular hashtag.
Visit the Explore tab on Instagram and search the name of your business. From here you can see how many photos the Instagram community has uploaded about your brand. View individual photos for opportunities to leave comments and feedback.
By occasionally liking and commenting on photos about your business, you can gain followers from users already sharing photos of your products, services and more.
Hashtags are also helpful when you host giveaways, sweepstakes and promotions on Instagram to organize your entries and calculate the success of your promotion.
Lastly, continue to use tools like Nitrogram to monitor the number of photos about your business on a weekly, monthly or yearly basis to help determine the growth of your community on Instagram over time.
What do you think? Are you actively managing your community on Instagram? If so, what strategies have worked best for your business? Leave your questions and comments in the box below.
How to Set Your Social Media Strategy and Measure It
In this video I interview Dave Fleet, vice president of Digital at Edelman in Toronto.
Dave shares how social media measurement impacts businesses today. You’ll learn what strategies businesses are using to measure their social media marketing efforts.
Be sure to check out the takeaways below after you watch the video.
Here are some of the things you’ll learn in this video:
- Discover some of the mistakes that businesses are making when it comes to social media.
- Why as a company you need to step back and look at things from a more strategic perspective.
- What’s a good strategy to put in place for your corporation.
- How to set up social media to make it scalable.
- Why you should think about the infrastructure you need to support social business.
- Why measurement is about more than just results.
- Why success should never be based on views or follower numbers.
- Learn what trends corporations should be paying attention to.
- Why content is an emerging trend.
Connect with Dave on Twitter @davefleet and check out Dave’s blog and Edelman.
What do you think? Do you have a social media strategy in place? What tips do you have to share about your experience with measurement? Please leave them below.
The 6 Types Of Social Media Users
5 Simple Metrics to Track Your Social Media Efforts
Are you looking for simple, straightforward metrics to measure the impact of your social media efforts?
Social networks and blogs continue to dominate Americans’ time online (accounting for nearly a quarter of total time spent on the Internet) according to a recent Nielsen report on social media, .
While we all know how important it is to market through the various social networks, it is vital to track and measure your efforts for success.
Here are five simple metrics to find out whether your social media effort is paying dividends.
#1: Examine Referring Traffic
Google Analytics is a fantastic way to measure how much traffic is being referred to your website from the various social channels.
Under the Traffic Sources tab, click on Referring Sites and then type in your social network of choice to see how much traffic is being referred. Set up goals based on the actions you want your visitors to complete.
Quick Tip: For Twitter referrals, search both Twitter and t.co, which is the built-in Twitter link shortener.
Increasing referral traffic from social sites is a good indicator that your social efforts are moving the needle in the right direction.
#2: Review the Quality and Relevance of Content
Content is the fuel for your social media engine, but if it’s not relevant and useful, it’s a waste of digital space.
The correct way to assess the value of a piece of content is not by continuously checking every five minutes to see if your retweet count goes up or if someone comments on your blog. These “vanity metrics” give a false sense of hope that your content is generating leads for your brand or business.
Instead of judging the success of your content by the feel-good double-digit share button, pull back the curtain and see what’s really going on.
For each piece of content you create, monitor unique page views, time on page and total pages viewed. If unique page views go up, that’s an indication that your reach is growing, increased time on page shows that your content is interesting to the visitor and increased total page views means your visitor wants to learn more by clicking on other pages around your site.
You can easily track these three mentions within Google Analytics by clicking on the Content tab, then choosing Overview. This will give you a snapshot of your top pieces of content along with detailed metrics including page views, unique page views and time on page. Drilling down into your content with Google Analytics is a great way to determine which content is resonating with your audience.
#3: Look at Share of Voice
With social media, share of voice refers to the number of conversations about your company versus your competitors/market. The value of online customer and prospect interaction can be tied to the share of voice (SOV) metric, which I like to call “The Big Picture Show.”
Segment brand mentions by social channel to uncover opportunities for improvement. You may find that your efforts on one particular channel are going unnoticed, but excelling on another channel.
The formula for calculating SOV is simple: divide the number of conversations or mentions of your brand by total number of conversations or mentions about other brands in your market.
To get your total number of conversations you can use a free tool such as SocialMention or if you have the budget, a more robust tool such as Radian6 has a widget that can calculate this metric for you.
Share of Voice = Your Mentions / (Total Mentions for Competitive Companies/Brands)
Share of voice: the number of conversations about your brand versus your competitors/market.
#4: Track the Total Size of Community and Engagement
Measuring and tracking the size of your collective communities is essential in determining whether you are adding value through your social strategy. Using a social CRM tool is a great way to integrate customer data with social profiles and interactions while monitoring growth and engagement levels.
Social CRM tools such as Sprout Social aggregate your activity into one easy-to-view dashboard where you can quickly see whether your strategy is moving in the right direction. Sprout offers a pretty good view of your basic metrics, including engagement and total size, and even goes a step further with recommendations for influencers to focus on.
Social CRM tools are an easy way to manage and track your profiles and activity all in one place.
#5: Measure Sentiment
Sentiment analysis is imperfect at best, often ignoring the human element of sarcasm or simple context. To be completely accurate, you need to track this manually.
Go through your mentions and tag them as positive, neutral or negative. Add up the totals and measure over time. Are the good mentions growing and the negative mentions decreasing?
Sentiment analysis can be thought of as "opinion mining."
Track Your Social Media Return on Effort
The social metrics used to determine success are the ones that make sense for your business and that you can tie back to your marketing bottom line.
Building a simple dashboard manually or using a social CRM tool as mentioned above is an easy way to track and update these metrics on a weekly or monthly basis. You can then monitor trends and set goals for growth based on what’s working.
If your metrics are not moving in the right direction or seem to be stalled, try mixing up your messaging and experimenting with different posting times and frequency.
What do you think? Does your business measure ROE? Which metrics are most important to your social strategy? Join the conversation and leave your questions and comments below.
5 Simple Metrics to Track Your Social Media Efforts
Are you looking for simple, straightforward metrics to measure the impact of your social media efforts?
Social networks and blogs continue to dominate Americans’ time online (accounting for nearly a quarter of total time spent on the Internet) according to a recent Nielsen report on social media, .
While we all know how important it is to market through the various social networks, it is vital to track and measure your efforts for success.
Here are five simple metrics to find out whether your social media effort is paying dividends.
#1: Examine Referring Traffic
Google Analytics is a fantastic way to measure how much traffic is being referred to your website from the various social channels.
Under the Traffic Sources tab, click on Referring Sites and then type in your social network of choice to see how much traffic is being referred. Set up goals based on the actions you want your visitors to complete.
Quick Tip: For Twitter referrals, search both Twitter and t.co, which is the built-in Twitter link shortener.
Increasing referral traffic from social sites is a good indicator that your social efforts are moving the needle in the right direction.
#2: Review the Quality and Relevance of Content
Content is the fuel for your social media engine, but if it’s not relevant and useful, it’s a waste of digital space.
The correct way to assess the value of a piece of content is not by continuously checking every five minutes to see if your retweet count goes up or if someone comments on your blog. These “vanity metrics” give a false sense of hope that your content is generating leads for your brand or business.
Instead of judging the success of your content by the feel-good double-digit share button, pull back the curtain and see what’s really going on.
For each piece of content you create, monitor unique page views, time on page and total pages viewed. If unique page views go up, that’s an indication that your reach is growing, increased time on page shows that your content is interesting to the visitor and increased total page views means your visitor wants to learn more by clicking on other pages around your site.
You can easily track these three mentions within Google Analytics by clicking on the Content tab, then choosing Overview. This will give you a snapshot of your top pieces of content along with detailed metrics including page views, unique page views and time on page. Drilling down into your content with Google Analytics is a great way to determine which content is resonating with your audience.
#3: Look at Share of Voice
With social media, share of voice refers to the number of conversations about your company versus your competitors/market. The value of online customer and prospect interaction can be tied to the share of voice (SOV) metric, which I like to call “The Big Picture Show.”
Segment brand mentions by social channel to uncover opportunities for improvement. You may find that your efforts on one particular channel are going unnoticed, but excelling on another channel.
The formula for calculating SOV is simple: divide the number of conversations or mentions of your brand by total number of conversations or mentions about other brands in your market.
To get your total number of conversations you can use a free tool such as SocialMention or if you have the budget, a more robust tool such as Radian6 has a widget that can calculate this metric for you.
Share of Voice = Your Mentions / (Total Mentions for Competitive Companies/Brands)
Share of voice: the number of conversations about your brand versus your competitors/market.
#4: Track the Total Size of Community and Engagement
Measuring and tracking the size of your collective communities is essential in determining whether you are adding value through your social strategy. Using a social CRM tool is a great way to integrate customer data with social profiles and interactions while monitoring growth and engagement levels.
Social CRM tools such as Sprout Social aggregate your activity into one easy-to-view dashboard where you can quickly see whether your strategy is moving in the right direction. Sprout offers a pretty good view of your basic metrics, including engagement and total size, and even goes a step further with recommendations for influencers to focus on.
Social CRM tools are an easy way to manage and track your profiles and activity all in one place.
#5: Measure Sentiment
Sentiment analysis is imperfect at best, often ignoring the human element of sarcasm or simple context. To be completely accurate, you need to track this manually.
Go through your mentions and tag them as positive, neutral or negative. Add up the totals and measure over time. Are the good mentions growing and the negative mentions decreasing?
Sentiment analysis can be thought of as "opinion mining."
Track Your Social Media Return on Effort
The social metrics used to determine success are the ones that make sense for your business and that you can tie back to your marketing bottom line.
Building a simple dashboard manually or using a social CRM tool as mentioned above is an easy way to track and update these metrics on a weekly or monthly basis. You can then monitor trends and set goals for growth based on what’s working.
If your metrics are not moving in the right direction or seem to be stalled, try mixing up your messaging and experimenting with different posting times and frequency.
What do you think? Does your business measure ROE? Which metrics are most important to your social strategy? Join the conversation and leave your questions and comments below.
