Social Media

Common Factors of Social Media Success

Question: Don't you think its tough to measure social media?

So the other day I was talking to a friend (client) in regards to social media and the question came up on don't you think its tough to measure social media? My answer to that was it might be simpler than you think if you use the four common factors of social media success:
The four common factors that came to my mind are attention, participation, authority and influence. So you ask what the definition of measuring these factors is:

Attention: The traffic to your content over a given period of time. (Metrics of site visits, page/video views)

Participation: Then extent to which users engage with your content in a channel. (Face book posts, You Tube rating)

Authority: This measures the inbound links to your content (trackbacks and inbound links to a blog post, etc)

Influence: The number of users subscribed to your content. (Blogs, RSS feeds, email subscribers, follower on Twitter, etc)

Beyond these factors one other factor comes into play and its "sentiment". This is really the reason someone is participating. When you put all this together you get a social media score.

Now the big question for each business is "What is the monetary value of each visit, comment, link or friend?" The answer to that depends on how much these interactions meant to helping to build, secure and maintain your brand.

When making sure that your social media score is helping to build your brand you must also keep in mind what the users of social networks want to accomplish. Ensure that the users are also given a real voice and that you listen to them; ensure that you interact with them in the social realm the way they want to be interacted with. ( Example: If they are on a video social network site - providing them info in a text format doesn't make sense - they are on a video site because they love videos) and finally make sure that your company isn't looking at social media as the "magic bullet" - social media needs to be part of your overall communications strategy.

The best advice is to ask yourself what social networks should be part of our plan, what compliment our current communications strategy and to make sure you always ensure that when you throw the "ball at the social media target for your company/brand" that is sticks. Don't do it just because everyone else is doing it.