The digital marketing team identifies the metrics and targets to monitor the social media performance of the organization. The overall targets for social media are distributed among the selected social media elements, and the metrics identified for gauging awareness across social media channels are identified to help the digital marketing team monitor the effectiveness of the Content Creation and Distribution Plan. Metrics relevant to relationship management, such as time spent by customers engaging with the brand on a regular basis, are identified and targets are defined. Consumer perceptions of the company’s products or services are monitored regularly to identify poor experiences that customers report while engaging with the brand on social media platforms.
All optimization efforts to build and maintain strong relationships with customers and others must be measured using these metrics and targets. Any shortfalls from the targets must be evaluated, and further optimization efforts should be explored. However, when a company exceeds targets for building relationships through social media, it must understand the reasons for its success, so that it can replicate that success long-term and in other channels.
Here are two examples of Relationship Metrics and Targets for Social Media Elements:
- Most companies use multiple metrics to measure their social media efforts. Some companies track the cost-per-customer, number of new customers, number of brand impressions, referral traffic, and the number of target customers talking about the company's products on social media. Relationship metrics typically focus on repeat activities such as the frequency of likes, shares, or tweets in social media. A company may also build a community of users via social media with requests for loyal customers to contribute to content. Such endorsements are good indicators of strong business-consumer relationships, and the growth of the online community of contributors is a useful metric for monitoring improved customer relationships over time.
- Companies that market their products using video sharing websites such as YouTube monitor the number of views, traffic sources, number of subscribers to the company's video channel, and number of website visits from that page. They also keep track of the page exit rates and try to identify the video portions where viewers lost interest. When a business is optimizing its social media content for relationship, it typically focuses on the length of time subscribers spend in activities that support the brand as well as on the number of subscribers who repeatedly view, post, share, and provide feedback, all of which are good indicators of strong relationships with customers.
These metrics form the basis for determining and refining specific metrics and assigning targets to those individual social media elements that are deemed effective for a company’s product promotion
