Analyzing your brand exposure in social media can be complicated. Blogs, Twitter and forums are just a few of the seemingly endless places online where a brand can be measured. Which ones matter? Which can be pushed off to the side? The key to success is to determine what you need to measure. You can't measure everything, so you've got to pick the best metrics (user comments, page views, etc.) for your goals. It can be a lot of work to decide which metrics to gather, but once you do, collecting the data becomes the easy part. Below are four steps and a few tips that will simplify the process and help you focus on what matters most:
List your goals. Make a list of general and specific goals that you have for your company or department. Start with general goals and work your way to specific ones. Try to be as precise as possible; it will be easier to pick metrics for more specific goals. For instance:
• Gain more exposure
• Get more Web site engagement
• Understand your consumer better
List your media and choose which to measure. Make a list of all the possible media (blogs, podcasts, forums, etc.) that could mention your attraction, destination, event, etc. It helps to make as big and wide a list as possible because it forces you to think of possibilities you might otherwise have overlooked. Search all the media on your list for mentions. Do this manually by going to YouTube, Google Blogs, Facebook, Twitter and others and using their advanced search page. To save time, you can do brand/name searches on sites such as www.socialmention.com, which will search your name in almost every media type. The risk is that sometimes these sites don't have accurate search functions, causing them to miss mentions that you might only find by doing manual searches through the sites themselves.
Now that you have a list of media and mentions, you can decide where to invest your measurement resources. In general, you want to measure the media with the most mentions. So, if you only have one YouTube video mentioning your brand in the past two years, you can safely decide not to track YouTube.
List metrics and choose the ones that best measure your goals. Once you've decided which media to track, make a list of the metrics for each medium. Cross-reference that list against your list of goals and decide the right metrics to use to measure each of them. The key to tracking your brand is aligning your goals with your metrics and making sure that what you are tracking is measurable.
Record results. Start tracking your metrics. Make sure that you are recording the results weekly or monthly. Put them into simple Excel charts that are easy to understand and report. Once you start making a few charts over a number of weeks or months, then you can start picking out trends and reporting on why things are the way they are. Don't be intimidated by the thought of all this work. Once the primary setup is finished, maintaining the research is easier. Being able to show with confidence how your brand is perceived makes the task of analyzing your brand’s social media exposure worth the trouble.
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