Measuring the Impact of Social Media: Facebook and Twitter
As multi-channel shopper engagement continues as an important trend in the retail space, dietitians are actively leveraging social media as a method to promote their programs and services and engage with shoppers. To gain insight on how to most effectively measure the impact of social media, I checked in with Grete Lavrenz, Senior Partner at Spong. In this first article, we discuss Facebook and Twitter analytics. In next week's RDBA Weekly, we'll discuss Instagram and Pinterest.
Grete's key piece of advice for measuring the impact of social media is to always approach social media with a set goal in mind. This is the most effective way to ensure your monitoring and tracking apply to your bigger business objective. When combined with other program metrics, it can be an effective way for retail RDs to communicate the multichannel impact of their initiatives.
According to Grete, "Facebook allows many metrics to be tracked across the platform, but impact can be best measured by looking at reach, engagement and followers. Users should also think about the goal of their social channel – is it to reach many users, or is it to engage many users? Both? This will help filter what to track more closely." On a post-to-post basis, Lavrenz recommends retail RDs monitor the number of likes, shares, comments and clicks the post gets. She continues, "what determines the quality of a post, however, is layering the number engagements on top of the number of impressions the post received. For example, if a post reached 23K users with 718 engagements, the engagement rate is three percent, meaning of those 23K consumers reached, three percent chose to engage with the post." A key takeaway from this data could be that the post was very successful in reaching many consumers, though not as successful in engaging consumers.
If your page is set up as a brand of company channel, impact can be measured with Facebook Analytics, which is found in the top menu bar under “Insights.” If the page is set up as a personal account, looking at number of followers and amount of engagements on a post is most helpful
Twitter provides more quality insights for a set period of time rather than each singular tweet since Twitter users often post more frequently than they post on other channels. Each month of analytics provides the user with the number of impressions, profile visits, mentions and followers earned for the time period. Grete advises, "to gauge success on the channel, set goals around gaining followers, reaching many users, engaging many users or earning profile visits. Based on the goal, a user can compare each month’s summary with the previous month to determine whether the channel is seeing success."
Impact can be measured with Twitter Analytics, if the page is set up as a brand or company channel. This is found at analytics.twitter.com. For personal channels, Simply Measured has multiple free tools for monitoring analytics on Twitter and Facebook.
Check in next week to for insight from Grete on how to effectively measure the impact of Instagram and Pinterest.
Educational Opportunities
No upcoming educational opportunities at this time.
