Measuring Business Success on Social Media
Thesis
While much has been hypothesized on the pivotal role played by the social media in offering a viable platform in which business firms can attain an enormous magnitude of success (Jilly, 2012), it is imperative to device and note adequate ways in which such business firms can attain their success (Casimir & Doris, 2012). Social media in the recent has past played a major role in creating a platform in which business firms, individual and companies advertise their goods and services. Social media has a huge area of coverage and attracts many followers who happen to be the target clients of many businesses.
Various ways exist with which business can assess their level of business success in social media.
Discussion
Twitter
One of the social media that used mostly by business in advertisement is tweeter, this is a rapidly growing social media outlet in that one can tweet several times without becoming a nuisance to the followers by flooding too much information, and tweeter’s ease of access and fast response has made it a more reliable mode of advertisement. To measure the success of tweeter some metrics to consider include;
- Measuring the growth of the followers-this is done by assessing how many followers you get every day, week or month.
- What is the followers quality and engagement this is done by counting the number of users that interact in the business account
- The biggest question that really measures the success is how many people take the act of signing up for the service or even buying the product or service that you are offering.
- A study done in March 2012 by sterling Morris on business schools showed that of the 371 business schools 42 percent of them had Twitter handles and 100 percent of the top 25 business schools had Twitter handles. On comparing the average number of followers in fan pages in business schools, which have their Twitter handle linked to their web page to those whose Twitter handle is not linked to their web page, the number of fans in business schools with their web page linked to their Twitter handle was 1744 compared to 509 on the later. This shows that linking the Twitter handle to the web page helps to connect the fans with more information and get to access the information that they require hence are satisfied with these services.
Another tool used to monitor success in Twitter is by using My top Twitter by twit sprout highly applicable for Twitter social media platforms, this method monitors the rate at which a given Business tweet (s) has been retweeted or has become a favorite tweet for various people (Bill, 2012). Twit sprout uses tools as tweet vs. retweet ratio to measure success of a business. The higher the rate at which a business firms tweets are retweeted or favorite, the higher the rate of such businesses success on social media (Amit & Zott, 2001). Oreo and Audi are such companies using tweet sprout to monitor the success of their marketing strategies. Oreo receives approximately 15000 retweets per minute.
This is another popular social media outlet for business. Facebook marketing can boost sales by acting as a catalyst to other marketing strategies
In terms of advertisement there are various ways of measuring this success this include; the number of fans that have liked your page also the number of people that are commenting on the posts that one posts also the number of likes that the advertisement you post get.
Facebook method for determining success is by applying the “edge rank” algorithm, which measures the relevance of your page to for each of user. The Edge rank algorithm’s consideration includes the following.
- The intensity of the content that you share that is in terms of photos and videos or more weighty and inclusive than general posts that you post
- Time decay this implies that older posts are less engaging than new or fresh posts with recent content. Therefore, this method works in a way that for every user who loves your page may score 30, 50, or even 100 while someone who does not interact with your page scores a zero. Hence, the higher your edge rank score is for a given individual the greater the chances that your content or advertisement will appear in their news feeds. In the other case for those individual whose your edge rank is zero the chances that your content will appear in their news feed is a zero but the main challenge of edge rank is that Facebook never shares ones edge rank making it impossible to know how effective one is participating in Facebook in terms of business success.
Another tool that used to check the success of a business is the edge rank checker this simple tool gives an idea into how one’s page is performing in and is a guideline of the Face book effectiveness. The sample below shows the edge rank summary
Most important thing to note is how the edge rank checker score means to a business in terms of measuring its success it provides a reasonable assessment of one’s likely score. A summary of what the edge rank checker score means is as follows
- 0-10 is a below average score
- 11-20 is an average score
- 21-30 is an above average score
- 31 and above is an excellent score.
Therefore this implies that the lower your score is the less effective one is in terms of building affinity with fans, and the less fresh one’s content is. In this system, any day that you do not post the score is a zero and these impacts a lot in one’s overall average score but does not mean that one have to post daily to remain relevant. Therefore by engaging effectively with any size of fans one has in his fan page means that that page will eventually grow exponentially and hence exposing your brand to more of the right or target group and those who will connect with your business for the right reasons. Therefore, for one to check ones success in Face book, one should use edge rank checker to measure ones effectiveness ensuring you are not wasting time and energy while not getting any results.
This is one of the most popular social media for people in professional occupation; it has more than 200 million unique users in more than 200 countries worldwide this provides a very important base in terms of content sharing and reaching many people and the intended audience. To measure the business success of businesses advertising in LinkedIn is easier, one can monitor and see how many people came to your LinkedIn profile on certain period. Getting this information will help one in getting to know how popular one’s product is on LinkedIn. Analytics on LinkedIn allows for one to have great relationship building which then is useful in terms of building up ones relation with the clientele in linked in there are two types of analytics one can use in measuring the success in LinkedIn these are;
- Quantitative measuring
- Qualitative measuring
Quantitative measurement involves the use of numbers and the metrics that are measured in this include
- Business followers
- Linked in search results
- Industry and location representation
- LinkedIn profile view
Whereas qualitative metrics involve the measurement of the quality of your engagement and the metrics to measure include
- Inbox activity
- Requests for business
- LinkedIn signal keyword mention
- Likes and comments on update
- Group growth and interaction
- Recommendation
YOUTUBE
This is a video sharing website in which users can upload view and share their videos most of these content are uploaded by individuals though some corporate offer their material through the site. To measure the business success in YouTube metrics measures using the following metrics:
- Uploaded video views.
- Uploaded video views growth rate; this is the daily number of video views for the whole channel it also monitors the maximum, minimum and the average change of views for the selected time range.
- Subscribers; this refers to the total number of one’s channel subscribers to get this one need to check between the first and the last day of ones selected range.
- Total subscribers growth; this helps to regulate the number of fans who are either subscribing or unsubscribing from the page and the average change in the selected time period
- Total time viewed; this metric measures the time spent by the users watching videos in the channel also measured is the variance of time in ones selected range of viewers.
- Channel engagement rate this rate is calculated through a formula that is the number of dislikes, likes and comments to all the video in the you tube channel which is then divided by the number of the channel subscribers within the selected range. This also delivers the average channels engagement rate and the total number of interaction.
Methods Offered By Google Service.
Google services offers a platform in which many people get information on the various topics that the client is looking for. Therefore this create major place where advertises place their content to tap on the huge number of people visiting the site. Google offers this platform to measure success in this type of social media
The first way to measure success include the following
Click Through Rate (CTR)
This is the key metric used when measuring content performance because it helps determine the quality score. It also tells if the content is appealing to the people seeing them it and measures the percentage of how often people click on the advert after seeing it and a high CTR that is one percent or higher shows that one has a relevant advertisement that is connecting people. On the other hand, a low CTR means that is less than one percent means that the advertisement is not working also advertisements with high CTR.
Quality score
Determines the business success by measuring its content ranking and how much one pays per click. This shows that relevant advertisements get a greater position in the search page compared to the less relevant advertisement. A high quality score would imply that one’s content or advertisement keywords and landing page are relevant to the target audience. While a low quality, score would imply that one’s advertisement, landing page, and keywords are irrelevant.
Conversion Rate
This metric of measuring the success of Google services shows how someone’s click on your advertisement resulted in a conversation. This helps in leading the client to a certain direction of conversation to complete the target action on one is landing page. These rates help to determine when to involve the traffic to a meaning full transaction.
Google Analytic
- Another method device by the Google team offers a viable platform in which business firms can track the rate at which customers utilize their social media websites (Allen, 2010).
- Google offers analytic service that provides real time check on the number of times the social media websites of a given company are utilized (Infield, 2009). Some of these analysis tools include real-time reporting measuring activity as it happens, custom reports that help know the information you have to analyze and custom variables that analyze the custom segments.
- Google analytics is applied by many companies to monitor the success of their marketing strategies these companies include Adidas, apple company, Google analytics offer data based on how the websites are utilized then they advise on how to get more people visiting these sites.
Wildfire’s social media monitor
- This is another monitor in which business firms can assess their rate of success on social media platforms is by utilizing services provided by Wildfire (Li, 2012), which is a social media promotion corporation (Wilson, 2013) wildfire monitors the success using competition tracker, leader boards for Facebook and Twitter which tracks the number of tweets comments and likes.
- Marketing company offers free services that allow companies monitor and note the rate at which target customers utilize their social media websites in comparison to the rate at which those of their competitors are utilized (Melton & Hicks, 2011). By using competitor tracker one is able to compare the audience and know if one is gaining fans or losing to the competitor.
- The Oscar awards academy uses this software to create captivating properties on Facebook and you tube, since wildfire has an integrated solution it gives the marketing team data and insights on how to fine tune its contents, strategies to use and to identify the best promotional tactics. This will help bring the best response from clients.
Klout
Various methods used to asses’ business success on social media websites have distinct features (Sterling, 2012). Klout measures the influence by using data points from social sites, it has a range from 1-100, ranking increases with score. Klout allows accounts from different social media to be synchronized. Klout is one of these method that assesses the influence in which a social medial website belonging to any given company has driven action (Chris, 2013) based on evidence from various social networking platforms (Bill, 2012) then assign a score to comments and tweets, this will help tallying the final klout score.
Often regarded as the Klout score; this method provides specific information aligned with. Klout measures how much a business’s social media website has had influenced on people, as well as Nike and American express while sales.com is in the process of including klout in its decision making. The only problem about klout is that they have privacy breeches.
Real Business Examples
Conclusion
Social media has been growing at a high rate; many people are joining social media every day. Therefore, business companies using social media to advertise have an advantage of accessing more clients, attaching their websites to their social media makes the information available to their fans. Social media has an advantage of connecting people globally; the business therefore will grow geographically as client base increases. Having various social sites will reduce the business reliance on their search engine to get people know their websites. Interacting with fans on this sites helps to know their preferences. Therefore, one will provide goods that suit the customers, with time the business will grow in terms of quantity.
References
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