Following is a guest post from the smartest marketing chick in Canada, Rebecca Atkinson, who publishes The Direct Approach.
How does one measure Reach and quantify their social media campaigns?
Understanding the value of social media to your organization and being able to put an ROI to it means it becomes a measurable tactic. In order to be able to do that, you need to understand who you’ve reached during your campaign.
Reach is made up of three things:
- Conversations/Mentions
- Where are people talking about you or your product?
- How many places, and how many mentions?
- Sharing
- How many people are telling others about your company?
- Visits to your site from a social media site
- How many people came to your site from one of these sites/tools?
Looking at each of these three parts and then adding them together will give you a number of people you’ve reached.
Chances are this isn’t a unique number as people may do more than only one of these. A safe bet is that two of the three actions might be taken, so then take your total Reach number and divide that in half.
Looking at campaign costs
What did it cost you to run the campaign? For this you’ll need to take everything into account from internal manpower, agency fees, creative costs and even media costs, if applicable.
- Your cost per Reach then becomes your total cost divided by your Reach number (which was total Reach divided by two).
- For non-profit organizations, cost per Reach is something tangible you use to determine how social media compares to other tactics you use in your marketing efforts.
If you’re using an analytics system, you should be able to track when a donation comes in as a result of a visit to the site.
Stick with it!
Over time, you’ll be able to track the donor life cycle, which will help you determine quality and quantity behind the donations and the relationships formed.
For more in-depth information on how to get these numbers, including lists of tools used and actual formulae, check out this four-part series on “How to Measure Reach and Quantify Your Social Media Campaigns”.
Part Two – How to determine Reach
Part Three – Quantifying the campaign, the formulas
Part Four – A laundry list of tools available to measure/monitor
