Any PR campaign requires careful planning. In the past this meant a good media audit. But times have changed. With PR campaigns now integrating across many different channels, the necessity to plan a social media campaign so that the influencers are reached and engaged has become vital.

It is not easy to measure influence says Morgan J Arnold, CEO of social media analyst Track Social, because there are so many manifestations of influence and everything is moving so quickly. But it is not impossible. Arnold adds: “The analytics that are available give us dramatic insights into marketing interactions way beyond anything ever possible before the advent of social media. The problem is that although it is increasingly easy to measure lots and lots of things, it is increasingly challenging to bring all the measurements together in a way that makes sense for decision makers."

Azeem Azhar, CEO of social media analyst PeerIndex, says there are two ways PROs can gauge influence and engage users within social media: “First, once your understand your target audience it’s crucial to find the influencers, because they will cascade your message to a broader audience by channelling it through as trusted third-party advocates. Second, once your campaign is up and running, you can use social influence measurement to evaluate the impact of your work. Researching the people interacting with you and seeding your message can quickly let you work out how successful you’ve been at reaching the people that matter.”

Azhar describes how the right tools can help you identify relevant, influential people: “Someone you turn to for car advice will likely be someone entirely different than who you would turn to for fashion tips. Relevance is important and a generic influence score won’t differentiate this, whereas with topical influence ranking you can get a nuanced understanding of where people carry their influence.”

Not many PROs are excited by the word “measurement”. However, measurement is as vital in social media as it is with any other PR work. By measuring the results of your engagement with influencers, you can not only see whether your campaign is working but see how your campaign should evolve. It will also enable you to understand, in more depth, the influence web of the specific market you are working within.

James Withey, head of brand insight at media intelligence provider Precise, says that: “There is an abundance of social media measuring tools designed for this purpose, the majority of which provide raw data or automated analysis. In order to filter out the noise, it is important to combine the might of social media measurement tools with the flexibility of human judgement."

Withey believes that data gathered in social media is invaluable as long as it is harnessed and interrogated intelligently: “The key is to identify relevant conversations, to uncover how digital and non-digital PR campaigns are resonating, and why.”

Colin Wheeler, head of insights and analytics at digital marketing agency Waggener Edstrom Worldwide, says the power of any campaign is determined by the desired impact on the target audience – such as growing brand awareness, driving trial and endorsement from important influencers. He adds: “Ultimately the result will be measured by tracking the measures which reflect these desired impacts. There are plenty to choose from website traffic, sales/leads, content engagement, sharing behaviour, social media conversation.”

The secret of success lies in laying down the measurement guidelines in advance. Wheeler says, “If metrics are agreed and set up and form part of the decision-making on which channels to use and which customer audiences are going to be targeted, the measurement will be effective.”

Wheeler concludes that ultimately there is only one figure which confirms success, and that is sales, but the right social media measurement can show how a campaign has led to sales demand.

Case study
 

Joe Miller, marketing executive at BeeLiked.com, a competition platform working across multiple social networks, illustrates the importance of strategy and measurement in social media campaigns:

“Consider this: Sally runs a cake stall to earn some pocket money. She buys ingredients, bakes for hours and spends a day selling cakes. When she gets home her mother asks what profit she made, and what she would do different next time? Unfortunately, she has no idea. She didn’t record the cost of her ingredients nor did she keep a tally of which cake sold the most.

“It may seem elementary, but when it comes to campaigns, it is crucial that brands determine what success will look like, what they wish to achieve and then measure the results. Take CBS Outdoor’s recent #LookForLonger competition as an example, where the brand released cryptic tube posters and challenged commuters to guess the 75 London tube stations on its online microsite. The brand established that its campaign goal was to raise ‘brand awareness’ aiming to ‘highlight how interactive advertising on the underground can be when people are using Wi-Fi while waiting for their trains‘.

“The result? 176,032 site visits from 109,948 unique users with 1,160,000 registered game players.

“Before you embark on a social media campaign , first determine the goals and how you will measure success. And remember, if at first you don’t succeed then put your learnings into practise and try again.”

Written by Daney Parker