Joined Up Business Thinking in Social Media: Measuring Success

How important is social media to your business? It might sound too simple a question, but sometimes it’s good to step back and consider it.

Is social media important to your PR efforts, your customer service, your marketing plans? Does social media sit in lots of departments, or across all of them?

Far too often, social media’s impact is judged only within these silos. No-one asks the much more important question of whether social is helping a business to achieve its major goals at the highest level.

Every business has these goals. They also have strategies that will help them achieve them. The success of these is measured using tried and tested business metrics that we know work. Customer retention, new customer wins, sales, ROI and the rest.

So far, social has not been judged by any sort of a business metric. It simply hasn’t had to stand the same scrutiny as every other marketing tool.

One of the biggest reasons for this is that such a framework hasn’t been available.

But now there is one that ties social activity to wider business success.

Yomego has spent several months working on this with some of the best brains in the marketing industry – experts in social, measurement and PR; academics and, most importantly of all: clients.

It’s been a tough process, with so much to consider – but it has been collaborative throughout. Most of all, it continues to be so: Yomego is inviting feedback and interaction with the metric from all interested parties.

Social changes so fast, and is a tool that is asked to fulfill such diverse duties, that having such an open attitude is the only way that such a metric can remain relevant.

But most of all, this isn’t a framework that just looks at one area, counts a single interaction or adds pointless weightings to data. This is a metric that puts a value on social advocacy according to the needs of each business that uses it. There is no one-size-fits-all, but a series of options for each and every business, making the metric work for them. Not every business has the same goals, and any measurement of social needs to acknowledge that.

There’s a free whitepaper available to download from www.yomego.com. And most of all, we would love to hear what you think.