Measuring the impact of social media marketing is always a bit of an argument. There’s the argument that branding is more important than actual clicks and that branding will cause more users to organically type in your URL directly – something that’s not easily measured. On the other hand a lot of people want to know how many clicks they can expect if they have something they need to promote and send out a Tweet/make a Facebook post.
A recent, mildly hilarious example of this was The Next Web buying a tweet from Paris Hilton. Yes, a Tweet from sweet Paris may or may not be a particularly targeted ad buy for an Internet conference in Amsterdam, but an experiment is an experiment. Paris appears to have 6.6 million Twitter followers.The Next Web reported:
According to Google Analytics, the tweet brought in 2,652 visits, with 75% of them being new, and 85% of those visits bouncing. Given that it was more new visits than usual, we were surprised to see that the bounce rate stayed roughly the same.
The stats from BuySellAds, where we bought the tweet, showed numbers that were considerably different. As of the time of this writing, they’re showing 6,008 clicks of the link. The only thing that we can figure, to account for the difference, is the impact that may have been had by using link-shortening services.
And they couldn't really track if anyone had bought something directly off the tweet.
Social Media is tricky. How many people see it depends a little on the time of day and a little on luck. People don't check their old Tweets and Facebook feed backlog as religiously as they check the entire contents of their e-mail box. You have Tweetdeck and Hootsuite creating lists of people you want to follow on Twitter, but don't actually want to have to read. EdgeRank is Facebook's form of a search engine formula and can effectively hide you from followers. Even before you ask the question of whether the message you're sending out will resonate online, the absolute number of followers isn't going to be the number of people that see the message.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s better to have a lot of followers. There’s a better chance of something spreading virally, that way. It just isn’t a written in stone that there’s a percentage of response you can expect, particularly if the Tweeter has interests the followers don’t have, as was probably the case with the Paris Tweet.
That said, if you want really want to know what your social media coverage is as functional entity, you need to create a landing page. It doesn’t matter what’s on the page: a news story, an item for purchase, something on sale, a video – just pick something typical for your site. Do not link to this page from anywhere on your site. Instead, send the link out over your social networks. See how many times the page is viewed. See where the traffic is coming from. See the link turns up on other web sites. If you’re an e-commerce site, see how many people buy something after coming in from that landing page.
It might even be interesting to send out the landing page on a single social channel and see if that channel cross-pollinates with others. (i.e., does a Facebook post inspire Tweets?)
This isn’t perfect. The quality of what’s on your landing page and the phrasing of your test post/tweet will still factor in. You have to worry about what time of day to try it (and you might want to try this morning/noon/afternoon and compare). But it should give you an idea of what the real power of your social network is, without a lot of empty marketing jargon thrown in.
If The Next Web had set up that landing page, they *might* have seen more than 6K visits. They *might* have seen links popping up on websites they weren’t expecting. They’d have a specific unique point of entry to track visitors from and see if they bought. And if they didn’t have 6K visitors on that landing page, they’d be in a good position to dispute the ad network’s numbers. And if it had gone viral, they'd have a better idea of the path.
Now obviously, you can’t treat every tweet like this. Once in a while, though… if you really want to know what your social network can do for you, give it a try. And if you’re doing something off the wall with a celebrity, definitely do it and get some better data.
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Todd Allen writes for Startup Grind, among other things