The basics of measuring social media marketing success
I mentioned in a previous entry that social media marketing IS measurable. Letâs take a basic look at how you can measure your own social media marketing and take action to make it even more successful.
First, my philosophy is that marketing (or business development) is NOT advertising. Your goals in advertising are things like awareness, preference, and availability. Goals of your hospital marketing are things like:
But since weâre not processing health care through an online shopping cart, how do we quantify success? Â There are two categories that you must start tracking immediately. Â The good news is that tracking these can be as simple or complicated as you like. Â I prefer to track these things in Google Docs- so that I can access it from anywhere.
Here are the most basic and most effective things to measure:
#1. Measure the progress of your social media presence
Iâm a big believer of focusing on the things you can improve. Â Thatâs another reason why Iâm not fond of shooting for a viral campaign.
And when you focus on what you can control, the next steps you should take become self-evident. Â
You can control the platforms you tap and the content you post there. Â So, be sure to establish a baseline of where you are right now with items such as:
how many channels (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.) you have
how many blog entries youâve posted
how many fans and followers in each channel
how many partners you have (either internal champions or external partners)
#2. Take stock of your competition
You may be in a head-to-head competition with a hospital in your market, or you may have identified someone you aspire to be like. Â Find out how you competition is doing. Â Do they have multiple channels? Â Do they post regularly? Â How many views, fans, followers do they have? Â (Notice that these questions are very similar to #1 above.)
The good news is plenty of social media tools can help you monitor these things. Â You can either just count fans, views, posts, etc., or you can search for keywords related to your competitor. Â (Click here to learn more about keywords.)
There are many free tools like Social Mention and Compete.com. And there are a few commercial tools I recommend checking out: Radian6, Meltwater Buzz, SM2, Sysomos, and Trackur.
Whatâs Next?
After youâve identified your channels and their followers, here are a couple more questions to ask yourself:
Do those relationships matter? You can measure the depth and stickiness of those relationships with various analytic tools. For example, Google Analytics can help you measure social network traffic. Facebook Insights can help you measure trends from user demographics to content consumption. Twitter Analyzer (and tons of other third-party tools) can help you measure the reach of your tweets. And YouTube Insight can help you measure how engaged viewers are with your videos.
Do these tools/platforms help reach your objective?
Finally, itâs way more important to make sure youâre heading in the right direction by measuring the right things. Getting no place fast is no good, and if youâre ONLY measuring speed, you can fool yourself. Â
As an example, I was doing web-based work for a major university several years ago and they had been recognized by Yahoo! magazine as one of the nationâs most-wired universities. They wanted to make it a stated goal they be recognized again the following year as a âmost-wiredâ university. Great goal, right? Yeah...until that magazine went out of business! The lesson: list goals that directly tie into your marketing objectives (remember those earlier goals of transactions, market share and care ratio?) -- and measure success accordingly.
I hope this has been a helpful start in measuring success in your social media marketing efforts.
Hospital Connecter is a resource for hospitals and the healthcare community to use social media marketing strategy.