So now that we know a little bit about how word of mouth and social media marketing differs from your traditional advertising, we will see some examples of social media engagement and how one can measure it. For example, on Twitter, you could have engagement in the form of shares and retweets, which can be measured by how many shares a tweet had, how many likes, how many retweets, and so on. By the end of this lesson, you should be able to discuss the steps involved in building a social media plan and discuss metrics for tracking a social media plan's effectiveness. In 2013, when the Super Bowl lost electricity in the stadium and play was paused for a while, Oreo came out with a tweet very close to when the stadium lost power, with the very relevant social media advertisement that you see here. This situation demonstrates how social media has the benefit of being almost live and relevant. So you can react to situations very quickly, which is something that you cannot do in your standard advertising. Now, given that Oreo reacted so quickly, you can also see that within an hour, they had over 12,000 retweets and almost 7,000 likes. When you're coming up with a social media plan, there are certain steps that you need to follow. Because social media is always on, your need to always maintain presence to social media and your standard advertising requires a 24-7 monitoring process. You need to also do a brand audit by asking questions like, does your brand fit well with a social media marketing strategy? Does your market fit well with a social media marketing strategy? You also need to choose the right targets. Is what you're doing relevant to the brand? Do you intend to increase sales? Is your presence on social media more about increasing awareness, or is it about getting consumers to talk about your product? And so on. You need to choose the right mix between videos and posts, and between the different types of social media that are available to you, such as Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and so on. And you also need to decide on the content. Is it an image? Is it a video? Are you sharing tweets from other individuals about your brand or product? And so on. And, of course, you need to measure, which is essentially what we are concerned with here. How do you measure the effectiveness of your social media plan? Like most things, it's not an exact science, and you need to define what success and the timescale look like. And what I mean by that is, do you want to look at how good your social media did an hour after you posted it? Two hours, three hours, five hours? A day, two days, a week? And so on. So you need to decide that. In terms of success, is your social media about increasing sales, or is it about getting maximum shares? Is it about seeing how many consumers are aware and talking about your brand in a positive light? And so on. Some examples of useful metrics to consider are shown here. So, for example, let's say you have blogs to raise brand awareness, which is a target you might have. A metric that you might want to track is the number of unique visits, number of return visits, number of times bookmarked, or search ranking. If it's about brand engagement, then you might want to track the number of members, number of subscribers, number of comments, amount of user-generated content, as in the number of comments and so on, average length of time on the site. And if it's word of mouth that you want, then maybe the number of references, reblogs, shares, likes, and so on. With respect to microblogging services like Twitter, it could be the number of tweets about the brand or the balance of tweets, that is how they balance between positive and negative tweets. Or the number of followers of a particular brand's Twitter account. In terms of brand engagement, again, it's the number of followers, number of replies. And if it's word of mouth, where you want consumers to share your information, then it might be the number of retweets that you need to track. If you're looking at product reviews, then in terms of brand awareness, it's the number of reviews posted, as well as, again, the balance of reviews, that is, positive versus negative reviews. And the balance of other users' responses, such as, do people agree with the review, disagree with the review, and so on. In terms of brand engagement, it might be the length of the review, the relevance of the review, the number of wish list adds that your product obtained. With respect to word of mouth, it might be, again, the number of reviews, the balance of reviews, and so on. In the case of social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, there are several metrics that will be relevant and important to track for your market research plan. For brand awareness and brand engagement, you want to track the number of comments, number of active users, number of likes, amount of user-generated items. For example, do consumers post and talk about your product on social media? In addition, if you can connect engagement metrics to sales or the final objective you defined, then you might also want to collect the number of members and fans, the number of installs of applications, the number of impressions, number of bookmarks, number of reviews, etc. And finally, with respect to word of mouth, it's the frequency of appearances. It could be number of posts on walls, number of re-posts, number of responses to friends, and so on. When we consider video sharing, for example, It could be the number of views of videos, the balance of video ratings, the number of replies to the video, number of page views, number of comments, number of subscribers with respect to word of mouth. It could be the number of times a video has been embedded on other websites, and number of incoming links. That is how many websites link to your video. I could also include a number of references and mock-ups of derived work, number of times republished, and the list goes on. In sum, if you were to design your social media marketing plan, you can think of seven steps that can help you design it. The first step is to monitor the conversations. What are people actually saying about your brand? Second, you should identify the influential individuals in the network of interest to you. These influential individuals are basically people in a network who are more likely to be listened to in the network, and who have some influence in that network. Third, identify the factors shared by these influential individuals. Do they like certain specific attributes about your product? Do they like the fact that your product helps them in a particular way? Four, locate the influencers who have relevant interest and match your product. Fifth, recruit them. And sixth, incentivize them to spread word of mouth about your product. Once you do this, and if all goes well, in the final step you will reap rewards of your actions, where you'll likely start seeing higher-engagement social media, whether it be microblogging, your standard blogs, your posts on Facebook, or even videos in YouTube. In sum, in addition to determining how social media fits in your marketing plan, you need to use metrics to track the success of your plan. You also need to develop a procedure, like the one outlined in the lesson, of how you intend to disseminate this information about your brand in the social network. Any social media marketing plan will be incomplete without incorporating these important elements.
