Best Practices for Successful Social Media Campaign Tracking

Social Media Marketing (SMM) has transformed into one of the most widely used forms of marketing. One of the hardest things about SMM is its ability to be tracked because the viral component is intangible. As social media writer, Aaron Uhrmacher states, “In the absence of any accepted metrics, businesses still need to be able to determine whether or not a social media program is moving the needle, moving product or otherwise making an impact”.

Here are 6 tips on how companies can track the success of an SMM campaign:

1. Setting up goals
A company’s goals can vary based on industry. An educational institution’s goal might be
increased enrollment, whereas another company might be concerned with increasing sales.
Other goals can include reputation and brand management, exposure or even customer-client
conversation.

2. Utilizing a form of web analytics
Using web analytics (e.g., Google Analytics, Web Trends or Omniture) is a must. Although web
analytics cannot be placed on a Facebook profile page, it can track referral traffic. Once a
user reaches the company’s site from a social media platform, analytics can track user
behavior.

3. Analyzing information from web analytics
Once a company isolates the traffic coming in from social media outlets, it can measure and
analyze different metrics. Some of these metrics include time on site, unique visits,
conversions, pages viewed and new visitors versus returning visitors.

4. Keeping track of the audience
It is important to track who is reading your content through keeping track of different
metrics. For example, tracking how many people are friends of the company profile on
MySpace or Facebook, group members, fans on Facebook fan pages, etc. Tracking the number
of people a company can have contact with sheds light on who is interested in the given
product, institution or cause.

5. Tracking conversations
As the name implies, social media is about socializing with an audience. The more the
audience converses, the more word of mouth a company gets. It is up to the company to
ensure this word of mouth is positive by tracking the number of conversations, and analyzing
them to figure out what can be improved upon.

6. Tracking syndication
Tracking syndication is an excellent way of examining the reach of a given SMM campaign.
You can track how many users are subscribed to the company’s RSS Feed(s), demonstrating
the users that want instant notification of company updates. Another way of tracking is
through a social outlet’s potential for going viral. Tracking the number of views for a
company’s video on YouTube, for example, gives insight into how many users are sharing that
video.