Reading Log: Measure for Measure

In his blog posts, “Measuring the Impact of Your Social Media Program” and “Rules of Social Media Engagement”, Dr. Alan Rosenblatt emphasizes the need for advocacy organizations to measure the influence of their social media campaigns. Dr. Rosenblatt provides suggestions to measure reach, engagement and website traffic.

Measuring Reach
Reach is a campaign’s target audience that can potentially be exposed to their message. Measuring reach can’t tell a campaign if their message is working, but it can help determine if a campaign’s message is actually reaching their intended audience. The simplest way to measure reach is to count. Start by counting friends and followers, fans and unique visitors. Dr. Rosenblatt highlights MyTweeple.com, a tool that assists with exporting Twitter lists (including profiles) into a handy spreadsheet. From there, it is easy to examine Twitter lists and identify (and quantify) followers.

Measuring Engagement
An advocacy campaign can have a million followers on Twitter, but that number is irrelevant if the campaign doesn’t have a way to effectively engage their followers. Interaction is at the heart of social media, so the success of an online campaign relies heavily on campaigns interacting with their target audience. Websites such as SocialMention.com and SmallAct.com’s Thrive can easily measure the success of online interaction by providing retweet data.

Measuring Website Traffic
People that casually graze the web are unlikely to click on the links embedded throughout content on a website. This is one of the reasons why a campaign’s message must be incorporated throughout their site (and not just embedded in the links), so the visitor sees it regardless of what part of the website they visit. Measuring clicks within the content can still be useful, however, and easy to do with URL shortening websites like Bit.ly. These sites provide beaucoups of data for evaluating click-through frequencies.

In his video on CSPAN, Dr. Rosenblatt underscores the importance of measuring the influence of social media campaigns. Knowing what works and what doesn't helps campaigns get to know their audience. Understanding an audience brings campaigns one step closer to the ultimate goal - a successful campaign. Dr. Rosenblatt says, "Don't always think in terms of how many people are in your audience, think about who is in your audience. Because having a hundred very influential people in your audience is much better than having ten thousand people in your audience who don't give a rat's ass about what you're talking about. Think in terms of quality of followers - not quantity - and the quality will follow from that."