Can You Measure Social Media ROI?

The short answer is Yes, you can measure social media ROI. If you explore this question in a little more detail however, you’ll quickly come to the conclusion that when it comes to social media, ROI is not frequently going to be directly financial.

But as we know that there is much more to marketing than direct financial return, and with many brands already reaping the benefits of social media (and many feeling the pain of jumping in without consideration), there’s something about social media that brings a whole new dimension to the world of marketing. And when we refer to social media, we don’t just mean Facebook advertising, we’re talking about customer interaction, real conversations and relationship building.

How can you measure social media ROI?

Measuring social media ROI is a much discussed topic, and a topic that has historically been difficult to achieve consensus upon, not least because business objectives when approaching social media can vary quite significantly.

So what are the options?

As marketers, it’s numbers - quantifiable results, that secure budgets and with a largely qualitative medium, you’ve got to work hard to prove its worth. There are a number of things you can do and online resources that are available to assist you in putting together a convincing report of your social media success:

- Start with the obvious

Before you do anything else, make sure that you don’t forget to monitor the obvious stats. They’re easy to get hold of and tell you a lot about your standing in the social media world. Start with stats such as Facebook fans, Twitter followers, Flickr contacts, YouTube friends – working on building your presence in these popular communities is a good starting point if you’re new to social media marketing.

- Monitor brand buzz

Keep an eye on how frequently and in what context your brand is mentioned on social media sites – you can do this by using a number of the Twitter applications that are now available - setting up a search in Tweetdeck to monitor mentions of your brand name is a great start.

- Analyse the stats

Just as you monitor your website for traffic levels, unique visitors, time on site, bounce rates etc (and if you don’t, you should!), any reputable analytics package will also let you monitor your referring sites – sites that are sending you traffic. This lets you monitor how much traffic you are getting from social media sites. If you want to be sure the figures you’re getting are accurate, take an average pre-social media campaign and compare this to your stats whilst on-campaign. If you have a more advanced package, then you’ll be able to track right from referred site through to conversion – giving you a quantifiable and directly attributable financial result from your social media campaign.

- More quantitative measurement

There are also an increasing number of online measurement tools that can help to justify your social media spend and give you a guide as to the effectiveness of your social media efforts. A couple of examples of such sites are:

• PostRank – gives you statistics on your news / blog feed and ranks popularity based upon how often and where they are shared on social media sites

• Xinu – a goldmine of information providing a huge range of stats on your website from backlinks through to social bookmarks and much more. Best used as a guideline and benchmark to improve your online presence.

So the fact is, you can measure social media ROI, but it needs to be relevant to your objectives and KPI’s. Without relevancy in your social media activity, there are limited gains to be made.

When deciding on what you should measure, give consideration to the following three key metrics:

• Outputs – share of voice, tone of voice, site visits etc
• Outcomes – behaviour change, attitude change, increased brand reach
• Business results – the £££!

Embrace social media, enjoy social media and engage with social media. Given the opportunity to engage on a level never before possible, why would any marketer say no?!

Jocelyn
Marketing & Business Development Manager

What’s a mashup?

In recent months, we’ve started to hear the term used more frequently. We recommended the use of mashups in our recent article – Top Tips to Promote Your Business Online free – and it’s likely that you are are seeing or using a mashup a few times a week at least, probably without even realising it!

So, what is a mashup?

A mashup is the result of taking data from one or a number of sources and doing something to it to add value – altering it from its original format. This could be as simple as news aggregation - identifying all content on a certain subject matter, compiling it and then showing it on your own website. We did this using Yahoo! Pipes for Hi-Tec on their ion-mask campaign website, creating an ‘ion-mask in the news’ section for the website – providing the latest news from across the web on ion-mask and making Hi-Tec the authority on all things ion-mask.

Mashups do however take a variety of forms, with news aggregation being one of the more common applications. We’ve listed a few examples of mashups below to give you an idea on the scope and uses for them:

- Rightmove – Rightmove uses About My Place to show the location of properties on a map and to provide details of nearest stations.

- iGuide – iGuide uses Google Maps, WikiTravel, Geonames, Wikipedia, YouTube, Google Video and Placeopedia along with user generated content, to provide, what it claims to be, the most powerful travel guide ever.

- Flickrvision – makes use of Google Maps and Flickr to show images as they’re uploaded, pinpointed on a map of the world.

- Website Outlook – this site provides a valuation of your website based upon information taken from a number of sources including Alexa.

Why use a mashup?

We’re not suggesting that you go ahead and create a whole new website around a mashup, not unless you already have a great idea for one. What we are suggesting however, is that you consider the use of a mashup to enhance your website. You could start with something as simple as showing your visitors your shop locations using Google Maps, publishing your industry-related news on your website using Yahoo! Pipes or you could opt for something far more complex, such as an estate agent providing an automated valuation for a property based upon a selection of online data combined with their own formula.

Whatever your choice of mashup, make it relevant, useful and ensure it works as it should; and it will help to keep your website at the forefront of your industry. Your digital agency should be able to give you some suggestions for mashups that are relevant to your target audience – if not, get in touch with Bluhalo!

Jocelyn
Marketing & Business Development Manager

The Digital World of SEO

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is an often debated topic simply because the dominant search engines hold their ranking secrets close their chests. In this blog, I aim to look at a model created to help you think about your website in relation to the Internet landscape and make use of the two simple underlying but powerful topics that are the foundation to the whole strategy - text and links. This principle focuses on natural search listings.

The headings fit into a tidy acronym which it easy to remember: PACT – Preparation, Aspirations, Catwalk and Text.

Preparation

Preparing yourself for the web is about understanding the digital world you are about to embark on. Don’t limit yourself to just your vertical market, look outside and see what others are doing to achieve common principles such as user experience and relationship building. Armed with this insight, look at your competitor’s sites carefully and find out what they are doing really well and where they could benefit from the vast array of digital functionality. Do they have RSS? A blog? Do they show their case studies clearly and give the user insight into what they do? Some key points to this are listed below:

• Pay attention to how the sites ‘share’ their information with the Internet – after all, those who send more, receive more!

• Your users are interested in the substance of what you offer as opposed to who you are and what you say you can do. Prove to them that you have substance, through trials, videos, excerpts and user feedback/ratings (remember negative ratings can be a good thing since they give you a chance to reply and show how genuine you are).

• Work out your income method: is it advertising, membership sales, product sales or are you selling a service. Be realistic about conversion rates which can typically be 1% on ecommerce sites and know you need millions of page views each month to gain advertiser interest. Sites like the SitePoint marketplace can be useful to sell advertising whilst you are building up your traffic profile.

• Install stats such as Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools to follow your indexing and learn how the search engine spiders are reading your content.

Aspirations

Your aspirations sit directly beneath your brand. These are the keywords on how you wish to be perceived as a business. Are you unique, sassy, exciting, edgy, strong, leading etc… Build a profile of words that you want your customers to associate with your brand. Everything you then do as a business must adhere to these brand values. Some key points are:

• Use these words to direct viral campaigns, blog entries, website copy, imagery and other material whether it is on or offline.

• Actively use social media like YouTube, StumbleUpon, Flickr and PhotoBucket to engage with users who like to browse unusual and viral digital media. Remember to place keywords (see ‘Text’ below) in any links back to your site since these sites are held in high regard by search engines.

• If you have a small budget, at least consider a professional design of your site. The subconscious affect of a decent design can speak thousands of words and gain instant trust from a user. One trick is to familiarise yourself with well known like-sites and adopt similar styles.

Catwalk

This interesting topic has been around in the offline world for generations but lends a great hand to a social media strategy. Large clothing brands often demonstrate their creative fashion skills on a catwalk. Most of the clothing does not hit the high street stores but the creativity/uniqueness on display helps drive brand awareness. This is true of car companies who take part in F1 or frequently produce concept cars demonstrating innovation and direction. It makes them stand out.This is key to any viral campaign or social media strategy where high quality inbound links are built at great speed. Listed below are a few things you can think about for your catwalk element:

• A blog can capture an audience when written well and frequently. A blog allows you to inform customers of upcoming products/services, showing them that the company is ‘alive’ and developing. A blog can be an instrumental part of creating a long tail so it is important that they are written well and with keywords in mind. Social sites that you can get benefit from include blogger.com, digg.com, del.icio.us and technorati.com who are massive content aggregators made up of vast web communities. Consider using WordPress or Blogger to set up your blog.

• With the domestication of broadband, Internet speeds allow for the syndication of video and rich media. It is very easy to post a video on YouTube and embed it into your site. Consider putting time and effort into making use of this vast Internet TV channel where it is free to advertise. Depending on your business, there should be a large amount of video ideas you can come up with and make you stand out a little more from your competitors.

• Consider the use of Flash to create a game or competition for your users to take part in. Large brands continue to develop promotional sites to reinforce their values and drive awareness to their brand and gather email addresses for future promotions/newsletters

Text

Last but certainly not least is the ‘Text’ element of your site. Arguably, this falls to Preparation but due to the scale of the topic, I have separated it here. The main concept behind text is relevance. You want to aim for a low ‘bounce rate %’ (the rate at which users exit your site without visiting more than one page). Some key tips for optimising the text on your website:

• Use tools such as Google Keyword Tool to find out the traffic volumes on relevant keywords. This useful tool will show you search volumes and likely keyword targets. For example; If more people are searching ‘Vans’ than ‘Commercial Vehicles’ then you would use the word ‘Vans’ with prominence over ‘Commercial Vehicles’.

• Include title, meta keywords and meta description on every page and aim for unique and highly specific descriptions for the content of that page. Sometimes it is impossible to uniquely markup each page but where possible make use of article/product titles and synopsis/short descriptions within the meta data of the page.

• Consider the use of a tag cloud. Not only do these ‘shout’ to the user what is popular/most listed on the site, they are great for search engines and contain targeted hyperlinked words linked to relevant results.

• Make sure any inbound links you control (such as those on the social media sites) contain relevant keywords to the page they are linking to and in addition to this, make sure those words get high search volumes from the research you would have conducted above.

• Use modern coding standards (XHTML and CSS - http://www.alistapart.com/articles/seo). This minimises the amount of code used to create the page and provides a clean presentation layer for search engines to easily index your site. Also, think about the logical structure of your content making use of headings, sub-headings and bulleted/numbered lists.

• Use title/alt tags on images and name your images with descriptive keywords. Image searches such as Google Image search can provide a substantial amount of traffic.

So in summary, SEO is the sum of its parts and it is important to focus on each the above with the same intensity. The Internet is a ‘network of networks’ so everything you do has a ripple effect that can in turn improve your SEO. There is one more element that supports all of the above and that is frequency. The more frequently you can produce a blog, a video, an image etc... the greater the expanse of inbound links and search keywords that lead to your site (also known as the ‘Long Tail’ http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html). User Generated Content (UGC) can aid in automating much of this but that is for another day…

David