Top Complaint: How Can I measure #SocialROI

We came across this MediaPost article, “You’ll Never Guess Social Media Marketers’ Top Complaint”, and thought maybe we can help. Overall it’s a great read and think you should dig into it before reading our thoughts below.

So it’s true, right now as we come into a decade of using Social Media and Digital as a pertinent part of the marketing mix most brands and companies are still struggling to define and figure out their Social ROI. It’s interesting that it’s taken us this long to really nail this but this should be an easy one folks. With the change from traditional, direct and print marketing many of our key values and metrics are the same and figuring them out is almost the same. Just as before when you measured the amount of views or impressions on a magazine ad, now you can look at those some metrics on your Facebook post. The nice part is your images are being put in front of your audience much more frequently and offer a chance for them to engage. Not only can you look at impressions but now you can see if anyone took an action such as a like, click or comment. These values should be much more valuable and can be rated higher.

HubShout’s Full Infographic:http://hubshout.com/?2015-Social-Media-Stats-Infographic&AID=1656#.VYHkWFX3_Gf

With similar business objectives as to before along with similar values it should be easy to plug in some numbers so you can decide what actions by users might be worth. From there taking into account any expenses (ads, SEO, team costs, etc) you can calculate your ROI.  We even outlined these steps in one of our blog posts awhile ago. However with the amount of items and varying levels of relationships with users through Social Media this can be incredibly cumbersome. What’s more once you have it all figured out, how do you know which of those posts or numbers may have been better so you can keep doing it? Or how do you know that Tuesdays, for example, was the best day to post? Tricky.


So, If at least 60% of marketing professionals are struggling to figure out their ROI then I guess we are doing something right. We built LiftMetrix to empower marketers to act on their social media analytics without having to spend hours in spreadsheets or hire data teams. Get a free trial today, chat with one of our team members or share your thoughts below!

 

Read More

Gartner’s Cool Vendors in Social Marketing (2015)

Gartner has just released their list of “Cool Vendors in Social Marketing” for this year and we’re proud to announce making the list! Making the ranks with four other great industry tools, CommandPost, Expion, InsightPool & Traackr, to “help run social initiatives at scale, to a point of measurable performance. Each of the providers, [including yours truly,] help marketers bring more intelligence, scale, efficiency, measurability and accountability to their social marketing programs.”

From Gartner:

“Social marketers can advance their programs by gathering and applying
audience insight, and by using better performance metrics to improve
execution. Our Cool Vendors offer emerging tools and technologies to help
social marketers design more effective engagement strategies and improve
ROI.”

 Julie Hopkins carefully provides an analysis on LiftMetrix giving insight into all the great reasons we love our product along with some challenges organizations may come across. Finally she emphasizes the importance of digging into Social ROI and tracking how to value your organic and paid social activities. Read the full report and analysis here.

Read More

Identifying and Comparing Against Competitors

When you are just getting started on social media it’s important to see what’s out there and who better to look at than your competitors. But you may be wondering, who are my competitors? Sometimes it’s trickier than you think when you aren’t a typical brand, such as Nike, and the hard part is typically identifying a competitor or even narrowing down what you do!

Keep in mind a competitor may not necessarily mean you are direct competition but you can learn from someone who has the same target audience or types of products. So now, think about the key things you do and who you do it for, then find brands or companies with the following in mind:

  • Similar product offerings
  • Same target audience (age groups, industry, B2B/B2C, gender, etc)
  • Do searches and monitor keywords that are included in your main business to identify others

Once you have your competitors identified it’s time to see what they are doing. You have a few options, you should start by finding and following all of their existing pages and taking a peek at what’s happening on their pages (we prefer to use our personal sites for this).

From there, you may spend quite a bit of time trying to find the types of content they are finding successful and any key themes they are using. Another option is to leverage us (LiftMetrix) to do the hard work for you, by simply popping in the Facebook page of those competitors and then we can pull their details from 7 social sites and do the analysis for you. We can provide recommendations and analysis on their types of content, what seems to be working, engagement rates, etc.

Any other things we forgot that you find useful when comparing against competitors? Comment below!

Read More

ROI Measurement & Intelligent Recommendations with the new LiftMetrix/HootSuite Integration

Today we’re excited to announce a new integration with the world’s most widely used social relationship platform, HootSuite, to bring powerful recommendations and ROI capabilities into the Hootsuite dashboard.

This new partnership takes our unique ROI tools and combines it with Hootsuite’s comprehensive content management system to provide a 360-degree approach to your social community management. Not only will you have all of the benefits of HootSuite but now you can leverage our proprietary data science algorithms to intelligently post content, measure ROI and buy ads all within one user interface.

 

Game Changer

If you work in marketing or social media, you have probably frequently been asked what’s the ROI for your social media. In addition, you may be trying to find ways to intelligently and quickly adjust your content strategy based on your community’s engagement.

That’s where we come in! The LiftMetrix platform was built to enable customers to define an ROI framework so they can understand their performance through a business objective lens and receive recommendations that grow their business. In addition, it was built for the everyday user with plain text insights, ROI calculation, post previews and more.

The combined capabilities from the LiftMetrix/HootSuite integration provide a daily customized social media game plan right inside of an industry leading social relationship platform. This means a better answer to your ROI questions, a way to easily adjust your content strategy and see how you compare against your competitors on a post level in one, easy to use place.

 

The Specifics

In case you need more, below are the features now available in the HootSuite dashboard:

  • ROI Calculation: The ROI machine translates your social metrics into dollars and cents. This allows managers to evaluate which social networks and content performs the best through the lens of your business objectives.
  • Plain-Text Insights: Pragmatic and digestible, our plain-English insights explain why your social content has performed well or poorly.
  • Tagging: An easy-to-use post tagging system allows marketers to segment and filter their content based on themes that perform the best across posts and ads.
  • Recommendations: Custom recommendations are designed to provide a specific social game plan for your community manager to follow.
  • Competitor Benchmarking: An extensive competitor benchmarking tool enables you to track your competitors’ activity.
  • Post Previewer: An algorithm estimates the reach and engagement for all of your custom content.

 

Give It A Try

So what are you waiting for? The integration is available immediately to all joint LiftMetrix & HootSuite customers. Existing Hootsuite customers can access a free 14-day trial of LiftMetrix by installing the LiftMetrix integration from the Hootsuite App Directory. For companies that aren’t currently customers, sign up for a platform demo today.

 

 

 

Read More