By Rebecca Surtees and Laura Mead
Confusion. This was the key takeaway from the final session of last week’s Social Media event: Social Media Measurement. There’s no doubt that social media is growing massively in popularity and certainly has a place – though quite where is still undecided. After sitting in on Friday’s discussion, it seems clear that the major challenge is how to get business value out of social media. In fact, one of the biggest hurdles that we in the PR industry face is proving to clients that social media is valuable enough to a) get involved in the discussion and b) provision budget and resources for it (ie. pay for it!)
Building relationships has always been fundamental to a business’s bottom line and at the dawn of a new decade, social media is the optimum channel. The key is understanding what you want to achieve with these tools and setting tangible, focused objectives – this makes it easier to measure the impact that social media can have on your business. Yet, the million dollar question remains, how do we do this?
We know engagement, sentiment and influence are key to the process, but what are we looking for in the tools and software systems that exist? With around 60 social media and monitoring vendors in the space – many of whom seem to flog the same type of service – we thought we’d let you in on a few of the tips we picked up during the session:
1. Measuring social media can’t be done in a vacuum, it has to be undertaken in the wider context of the web
2. There is no silver bullet – the key is using a combination of customised tools aggregated onto one platform
3. Understand what you are trying to achieve, then align monitoring tools to help you reach these objectives
4. Analyse sentiment to determine your key influencers and use comment counts or forum thread sizes to help measure engagement effectively
5. Reach metrics need to be separated – each social media platform is its own community and needs to be treated that way
6. Report and measure on a quarterly basis – there’s no other effective way to measure trends and peaks in traffic and to understand the impact on ROI
7. Last but certainly not least, always negotiate with social media monitoring tools and ask for a trial basis
What is evident from last week’s Social Media event, is that social media is still in its very early stages, with a lot of confusion around exactly what’s involved in the space. We’re likely to see a fair bit of consolidation in the sector soon enough and reckon a few of the digital industry’s giants will be wanting a piece of this pie too (a’hem, Google). In our experience, cost remains one of the key barriers for the PR industry, and so we’re particularly interested to see if companies like Google do dip their toe in the market, whether this will drive down the cost of monitoring social media.
What was absolutely clear from London's Social Media Week is that many people are still feeling their way when it comes to engaging with social media channels. We wonder how this will develop – from consolidation to the fusion of traditional and digital channels and how this may impact the PR industry. This all remains to be seen so, until next year #smwldn followers!
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