Do You Know How Influential Your Brand Is?
It’s funny how various brands measure their success by how many fans or likes they have on Twitter and Facebook. It’s not unheard of for a brand to have thousands of fans and still get limited to zero engagement for their products. What is it that they’re doing wrong? Do they care about your message? Do they share content back with their peers and are they actually helping propagate the message?
Here are some great free tools to help figure out if your engagement on social media is sticking.
1. Klout – What is your Klout rank?
Klout is a great tool. It allows you to monitor exactly how successful your campaign is and it shows you data you can use to revise and improve your content.
2. Edge Rank for Facebook
Edge Rank is another Analytics tool that you can use to monitor and assess the popularity of your campaigns and content on Facebook.
3. Alexa and Google Analytics
Even thought they don’t refer back to Social Media, Alexa and Google Analytics are both great ways to measure if your initiative is successful. By seeing your SEO rankings and traffic generated you can get a good idea if your push is working. At the end of day, the purpose of Social Media isn’t to constantly blab about yourself, but to get users to come to your website.
You hit the nail on the head when you said “the purpose is to get people to your site, not blab about yourself”… AKA DRIVE TRAFFIC, not direct sales.
I find it interesting that despite it’s popularity, people still have such a hard time determining actual ROI effectiveness from the use of Social Media. And rightfully so. It’s not because its not effective, it’s because too many self-proclaimed experts still really do not understand it and rely on it to do all the work for them.
As an ADman myself, ALL media is social. FB, Twitter, YouTube, are just amazing new mediums for this, not some new magical thing that makes things happen on its own virtue. If all a CMO has in their pocket is that they know how to make a FB post and read modern metrics, they are in trouble. You need to UNDERSTAND trends, and develop comprehensive strategies, not just read numbers.
Too many focus on LIKES as a means to more direct sales. It simply is not the magic bullet many marketer would like it to be (or try to convince their bosses it is). 10,000 Likes simply does not equate to a logarithmic increase in sales. I see this over and over at my agency. Too many clients think they can directly increase revenue by increasing the number of likes on thier site. This simply is not the case if you have no other strategy, a disjointed strategy or if your product/customer service is not up to expectations.
How many times have we seen the phrase “Like us to enter to win.” Of course people may like you FB page if it enters them for a chance to win $250,000. It still does not mean that individual will buy your product or is even in the market for your services. This only makes the LIKE function that much more irrelevant as a direct tool, and the general population knows this on a basic level. Personally, I do not rely on the number of LIKES on a FB to tell me how good a particular product is. It no different that a real person giving you $100 to tell someone else they are a good guy. Its only works temporarily, so you need to take advantage of that time.
With that being said, of course there is a real psychological impact of a company with a good number of likes. And having many likes and followers will have an overall impact on your position in the market, and as such cannot be ignored by any means.
GO LUNA!