Measuring ROI on social network activity is hard for marketers. Many use ‘number of fans’ or ‘number of followers’ as a success metric. If the number trends upward, things are good. However, in research, I’ve often seen people become embarrassed by the brands/companies that they have become a fan of.
“My friend told me to join up and follow this company as we could get special deals. I did what she asked but to be honest, it’s a bit embarrassing looking back at it now.”
Showing me how they use social networks raised their awareness of what is reflected on their profile page. People forgot what was lurking there. People often add themselves to groups and causes, and sign up for offers and coupons, but they rarely remove themselves from these lists. Many of these people are not your fan. Don’t count them and slap yourself on the back. They are a potential fan, but that’s a very different group of people and should be treated differently.
If you have a social network presence, don’t measure ‘number of fans’. Measure engagement (which means all of the below):
- How many fans visit your page?
- How many of them participated in an activity?
- How many talked about it afterwards?
- Most importantly, how many are repeat visitors? Exclude one time only visitors – they are not your fan.
- How often do you expect them to return? Daily? Weekly? Monthly?
- How often are they actually returning?
You want to get to a place where you can say things like:
“Our goal was for 2,000 of our fans to purchase in our online sale. We have 100,000 fans. 20,000 visited more than once in the last month. They are our real fans. Of those, 5,000 viewed our online sale. 300 of the 5,000 bought something. Of the 80,000 who only visited once, 230 bought something in our sale.”
Numbers like these can help you figure out what to do next.
Old post. Still very relevant.