Defining Social Media Success February 4th, 2010
Portia Krebs

Customer loyalty. Branding. Networking.  From the corporate level to individuals, social media success means different things to its users, and how you measure its effects is a relatively new and perhaps less precise area of assessment.  Here are a few ways to examine the progress and impact of your company’s efforts on the social media frontier:

Traffic.  Not all social media is easily quantifiable, but you can start by tracking the number of Facebook fans, Twitter followers, Delicious bookmarks, Diggs, as well as existing website traffic.  Also note benchmarks such as SEO rankings and referrals and customer satisfaction scores.

Quality.  While numbers of fans and followers serve as a good metric, companies should also assess the quality, not just the quantity, of connections they have.  An audience who is genuinely interested in your company or product is more valuable than high numbers of people who are not engaged.  On the individual level, though, many ‘weak’ ties may be beneficial — that distant contact might serve as a link to a new job, as opposed to just having your closest friends to help you.

Engagement.  Interacting with customers via social media is an excellent way to engage a loyal following.  With over 700,000 Twitter followers and more than 5,000,000 Facebook fans, Starbucks is a master of this strategy, engaging its customers on Twitter and encouraging Facebook fans to participate in open discussions and events.

Sales.  Today, some companies are seeing their social media efforts translate into sales by tracking paid searches and other channels.  For example, Dell linked its Twitter efforts to $1 million in sales, and Blendtec’s YouTube-driven “Will It Blend?” campaign resulted in “a five-fold increase in sales.”  The bottom line?  Engaging customers helps create customer loyalty, which often translates to profits.

ROI.  Social media is generally less costly than traditional marketing channels, such as advertising.  So look at how your budget is allocated across the marketing spectrum, and factor that in when considering your return on investment.

While social media is a relatively new arrival on the marketing scene, it represents tremendous potential to engage an audience in a low-cost and highly interactive way.  Broadband is speeding these exciting two-way communications nationwide – which are invaluable to a company’s customer relationships and their bottom line.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 4th, 2010 at 3:43 pm and is filed under Benefits of Broadband. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.