One of the questions that we are asked on a regular basis is, how does one decide if their Social Media program is a success? What are the Key Performance Indicators? Alban D’Sa, the Operations Manager at Quay Appointments in Sydney, Australia asked this in LinkedIn.
The answer is a simple one. You look at what you are trying to achieve with your goals and use the Social Media tools that are most helpful. Then you look at an indicator to tell you if you are succeeding. One of my favorite success stories in City Social Media is Suisun City. It has two Facebook fan pages. One is for the Downtown Waterfront District, the other is for Suisun City in general.
Both give information about the locale. The Waterfront District is more about business. It has over 400 members. That makes sense for a business environment. The city fan page has almost 2,000 fans. It is much more oriented toward the fun going on in the city. Scott Corey says that it’s easy for him to be the Marketing Manager for the city because it has such good stories to tell. The important thing is, he makes sure those stories are told.
Andy Moore, Director at iThnk.com of New Zealand says, “KPIs such as number of followers/fans, amount of traffic to your page or site and the depth of comment threads from your posts are all good ways of keeping tabs on your social media campaigns.
He suggests “choosing the indicators that are most the relevant to your objectives at the outset of your campaign and monitoring these on a regular basis to make sure you’re on track. For example if your goal is to really engage with people I would monitor the amount of comments and responses you’re getting with each new update.”
He wrote a blog post on this subject recently so please check-out the link below if you’re interested…
http://www.ithnk.com/2010/07/02/what-is-social-media-success/
@ Dennis Erokan – thank you for answering my question & the mileage by mentioning my name. Good to know the question inspired a lovely blog. Wish you the very best.
It is important for people to feel engaged in things. This is the best part about social media. However, it causes people (hopefully) to censor more things than maybe what has been done in the past.
Also, one of the biggest things that I have learned about this two way road with social media, is that whatever is said is there for eternity! Although one could technically say this about newspapers, journals, ect. Pulling up something on the web is too easy to do, and people have 24 hour access to it.
I think that social media is so beneficial, but at the same time I think causes people to be more cautious of the information they post!