One of the hardest things to do is convince small business owners to invest in social media. The problem is that good social media strategies involve an investment, a payment ahead of time for a return that isn’t always accurately measurable. How do you measure good customer relations?
But for those with the insight and strength to explore new media the question still remains; what is social media doing for me?
If you’re business has an online aspect, measuring the effect is easier than for your brick and mortar brethren. Use Google Analytics to track visitors to your site. Create conversion points at contact forms, this way you know who’s sending you messages and where they came from.
For more control over your tracking install the Social Media Grease Monkey Script. It lets you differentiate social media traffic and track it separately.
To make your life even easier, Google just released a new feature called advanced segmentation. With it you can track who did what on your site, and now you can see what social media users like and don’t like on your site. To better understand how to use the feature check out this series on Advanced Segmentation.
As you can see, online stores and service providers can simply look at analytics to get an idea of how social media users are interacting with their landing page. For offline vendors this becomes harder. So how do you measure online reach in an offline world?
One way is to simply ask your clients and customers. You see this all the time on your receipts. Companies offer prizes to customers for filling out an online or phone survey. Make sure to ask people if they’ve connected with you online and if it influenced them in any way.
Another good technique is to offer your social media friends free or discounted products. Track this with a coupon. As people use the coupon you get an idea of how many of your “friends” use your products. It also gives you a way to reward your loyal fans and generate a buzz.
The biggest difference between online and offline tracking is the need to add an incentive to the process offline. This usually means giving a discount or prize to get customers to do something.
Finding a way to track offline consumers being courted online is going to be one of the largest hurdles for social media marketers.
Hey Samir -
Thanks for the script to Social Media Analytics – recently switched to Woopra for analytics but will revisit Google with the plugin for measurement. I also rely on mashing the results of tubemogul, ping.fm, Postrank from AideRSS, etc but this often requires some alone time spent with Yahoo Pipes.
Have you looked into using “eminents” for monitoring the reach of offline engagement? Still requires some guesswork but provides a benchmark for future monitoring.
Andy Angelos
@Andy Thanks for the comment. I use tubemogul, ping.fm and postrank a lot. I haven’t heard of “Eminents” before but I’ll definitely check it out. Thanks for the heads up.