Social Media: Monitoring vs. Measurement

As more com­pa­nies increase their spend­ing on social media in 2011, it is becom­ing more impor­tant to track the per­for­mance of these key mar­ket­ing ini­tia­tives. Depend­ing on the social media plat­form and spe­cific activ­ity being tracked, you might have the option to take one or two approaches: mon­i­tor or mea­sure. You may feel that the words “mon­i­tor” and “mea­sure” are syn­onyms, but I’d like to clar­ify how the two approaches are dif­fer­ent in impor­tant ways when it comes to track­ing social media efforts.

To help explain the dif­fer­ences between mon­i­tor­ing (lis­ten­ing) and mea­sur­ing (tag­ging) social media ini­tia­tives, I’d like to share a sim­ple anal­ogy based on lis­ten­ing to music. Mon­i­tor­ing is like tun­ing into a radio sta­tion on your car stereo. Sure, you can choose your favorite type of radio sta­tion (i.e., pop, jazz, coun­try, etc.), but you’re at the mercy of the radio sta­tion to actu­ally play the music you want to hear. For exam­ple, you may really like alter­na­tive music, but you’re not so fond of par­tic­u­lar artists such as Nine Inch Nails or REM. You pas­sively lis­ten to the radio sta­tion hop­ing to hear songs that you like. If the sta­tion decides to change its music pro­gram­ming or genre, you really don’t have a say in it other than to change the channel.

On the other hand, mea­sur­ing is like cre­at­ing a cus­tom playlist from your per­sonal music col­lec­tion for an MP3 player. Every song is a favorite because it’s from your music library, and the playlist fits the par­tic­u­lar activ­ity or mood you’re in. If you want to adjust your playlist after­wards, you have that flex­i­bil­ity. The songs that you lis­ten to on the road via your MP3 player are the same ver­sions that you lis­ten to on your home computer.

3M’s of Social Media Optimization

In terms of track­ing and opti­miz­ing social media ini­tia­tives, I feel as though there are three main areas: mon­i­tor­ing, mea­sure­ment, and man­age­ment. All three of these areas are dif­fer­ent but com­ple­men­tary. Some­times you only have one option such as mon­i­tor­ing and in other cases all three options come together to com­ple­ment each other. For the pur­poses of this arti­cle, I’m going to focus on mon­i­tor­ing and mea­sure­ment. How­ever, as a brief overview man­age­ment focuses on man­ag­ing the var­i­ous cre­ative ele­ments of your social media efforts (e.g., images, text, links, cam­paign group­ing, etc.). For exam­ple, Adobe’s Search­Cen­ter+ tool fea­tures a Face­book ad inte­gra­tion, which cen­tral­izes the process of cre­at­ing, import­ing, and man­ag­ing ads for Face­book and paid search within in the same tool.

Mon­i­tor­ing (radio)

Most social media track­ing is cur­rently done with mon­i­tor­ing solu­tions, which lever­age the APIs of each plat­form (Face­book, Twit­ter, YouTube, etc.) to pull pre­de­fined met­rics and dimen­sions into web ana­lyt­ics report­ing. In most cases, we’re happy to get any data at all — kind of like pick­ing up a clear radio sta­tion on a lonely coun­try road in the mid­dle of nowhere. Some­times we’re even sur­prised by the type of data that we can get from the APIs (e.g., valu­able demo­graphic data).

Two of the biggest draw­backs to the monitoring/listening approach are that com­pa­nies can’t tie any of the social data to actual vis­i­tors on their other web prop­er­ties, and they also can’t obtain any addi­tional cus­tom met­rics beyond what’s already pro­vided by the social media plat­forms. Like a radio sta­tion, it’s a “take it or leave it” sce­nario. Because we can’t actu­ally tag a Face­book fan page or Twit­ter pro­file page, most com­pa­nies just lever­age the data that these social net­works pro­vide. While we can’t tie mon­i­tor­ing data directly to web­site activ­ity, we can use pre­dic­tive mod­el­ing to under­stand the cor­re­la­tion between var­i­ous types of social activ­ity and the website’s KPIs.

In talk­ing to cus­tomers, I know there is a great deal of infor­ma­tion that com­pa­nies would love to have if their cor­po­rate pages within social net­works could actu­ally be tagged in a more robust man­ner. For exam­ple, orga­ni­za­tions would like more in-depth data on how peo­ple are inter­act­ing with indi­vid­ual Face­book fan page tabs as opposed to just hav­ing aggre­gate fan page data. If a par­tic­u­lar tab isn’t being used, it would be nice to know that so that a com­pany could take steps to stream­line and improve the fan page experience.

Mea­sure­ment (playlist)

In some lim­ited sit­u­a­tions, social media activ­i­ties can actu­ally be mea­sured, mean­ing that com­pa­nies can tag them just like they would any nor­mal web­site, appli­ca­tion, or cam­paign. In essence, com­pa­nies can instru­ment or tag cer­tain social media activ­i­ties in any man­ner they like — choos­ing the level of report­ing, dimen­sions, and met­rics they need rather than hav­ing them pre­scribed to them by the var­i­ous social media platforms.

For exam­ple, a mar­ket­ing team might want to know how vis­i­tors are specif­i­cally inter­act­ing with a par­tic­u­lar social appli­ca­tion on their Face­book fan page. Armed with pathing and con­ver­sion fun­nel reports, they can bet­ter under­stand the user expe­ri­ence and fix poten­tial fall-out points in the appli­ca­tion. In addi­tion, another advan­tage of the mea­sure­ment approach is that the social media ini­tia­tives can be viewed in the con­text of a company’s larger online pres­ence (i.e., treat­ing social media ini­tia­tives as an exten­sion of your company’s online world), and orga­ni­za­tions can gain deeper insights into cross-domain pathing behav­iors and conversion.

Cur­rently, there are four main social media activities/areas that can be mea­sured, not just mon­i­tored, across the lead­ing social media platforms:

1. Social media cam­paigns: Any URL or short­ened URL (bit​.ly) can have a track­ing code appended to it so that tra­di­tional cam­paign track­ing can occur.
2. Face­book apps: Unlike Face­book fan pages (mon­i­tor­ing only), the appli­ca­tions and cus­tom tabs can actu­ally be mea­sured and optimized.
3. YouTube branded chan­nels: In some cases, com­pa­nies are given con­trol over a wid­get area at the top of their brand chan­nel, which can be cus­tomized to include a cus­tom player, other con­tent, and Site­Cat­a­lyst tags.
4. Face­book Connect/social plu­g­ins: Any embed­ded Face­book fea­tures on an exter­nal web­site can be mea­sured in Site­Cat­a­lyst to under­stand their effec­tive­ness and over­all impact.

Although the mea­sure­ment options are fairly lim­ited right now, I am hope­ful that the social net­works will allow more tag­ging oppor­tu­ni­ties in the future. As we’ve found over the past cou­ple of years, the social media plat­forms are con­stantly evolv­ing. It has been chal­leng­ing for small and large orga­ni­za­tions to keep pace with all of the changes hap­pen­ing in the social media space — let alone under­stand how their social media ini­tia­tives are per­form­ing. For­tu­nately, Adobe has strong rela­tion­ships with the lead­ing social net­works and will con­tinue to explore ways in which our part­ner­ships can help com­pa­nies to more effec­tively opti­mize their social media invest­ments. If you would like to learn more about our cur­rent social media solu­tions for Face­book, Twit­ter, and YouTube, please reach out to your account man­ager or account exec­u­tive. In the spirit of social media, you can fol­low me on Twit­ter @ ppt­ninja.