Social marketers are always on the lookout for solid ways to measure and analyze performance. When it comes to content effectiveness, the more experienced marketers are moving away from asking “What happened?” to “Why did it happen?”. In their quest to understand what content works, they are starting to seek answers to what their most successful social activity was today, yesterday, last week or last month.
It all depends on how you define success and what activities matter to your program. Perhaps you define activity as a campaign that crosses multiple social channels. Or you might define it in terms of a specific channel such as one Facebook account or multiple Twitter profiles. Perhaps you want to compare how one specific piece of content performs across multiple platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, your blog, Flickr or YouTube. Regardless of the lens you put on your efforts, you want to know when you are successful and why. You also want to know what didn’t go as well. And you want to know how to best replicate what worked and avoid repeating mistakes.
These are the question we set out to answer for social marketers with our new Social Analytics offering. We wanted to offer marketers the capability to drill down into daily social interactions and identify their most effective content, channels and contributors. Equipped with that intelligence, we knew marketers would then have the means to replicate success.
Working with our customers, we determined that what social marketing teams need is to easily conduct comparative analysis within and across social platforms. This gets to the cause and effect of social marketing efforts; if marketers know what worked, they can analyze what drove that success. For example, they can examine variables, such as specific wording, the time of publishing, and the use of hashtags. So, in effect, marketers need a new methodology to identify trends for a specific piece of content. Once they know how a specific post performed, they want to manipulate the variables, drill down into the specifics, and customize their reporting – all from one convenient platform.
It turns out we were on the right track with our Social Analytics approach for more reasons than one. Last week, Facebook announced a number of new ad units for their platform, including Facebook’s new Premium Offers and Reach Generator. Similar to Twitter’s Sponsored Tweets, Facebook Premium Offers allows marketers to promote their most successful Facebook posts as sponsored advertising, reported to provide 3X ROI for brands. This is why marketers need to quickly identify which Facebook posts to promote using Sponsored Stories, and Social Analytics can help. Join our free Social Analytics webinar on March 8 at 2 pm EST for more information.
We welcome your thoughts and feedback. What ways have you used to analyze the effectiveness of specific posts? What are your tips and tricks for creating viral content? Let’s continue the discussion in the comments below, on Twitter at hashtag #AwarenessSMM, Facebook at Social Media Marketing Best Practices, LinkedIn at the Social Media Marketing Mavens Group.
Mike Lewis
@BostonMike