Content Used to be King – Not Anymore

A voice. Every brand aims to have a voice. Ecommerce websites looks to sell products or services while trying to maintain a constant voice across their platforms. Greenberg, in his post on Content is King of Social Marketing said it best (Greenberg, 2009): 

Have something to say. Say it often. Be interesting. Sound familiar? This is essentially the content publishing model. By incorporating content development into your existing marketing calendar and production process, you can turn social marketing into an asset.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t hold true anymore. Brands can’t continue to push content without knowing what the audience wants to here. These days, what you say and what they say back to you is seen and resonated by millions across all social platforms.

Conversations Matter

At its core, social media has evolved to a world where brands converse with its audience. This is the social perspective.

David Armano of Edelman Digital developed an interesting infographic of how social engagement is about holding conversations with an audience, rather than pushing out content in hopes that it would stick. And all occur within platforms that are a breeding ground for engagement: communities, blogs, social networks and microblogs.

Jonathan Mariano or Triple Pundit wrote an interesting piece on social media being about conversations. He says that if we abstract away technologies from Facebook and Twitter, then all we are left with is a social media conversation ("Social media is," 2011). He adds:

It’s a way for folks to talk about anything in a public, ranging from current events, life’s successes and failures, or even about our passions like sustainability. It’s just another medium to have a conversation.

Social media is about ongoing conversations where content is merely the catalyst. And conversations are not just about words. It’s also about actions through our likes, shares, tweets, pins and more.

The Value of a Conversation

Considering all things marketing are driven by ROI, there is an obvious need to drive some type of ROI from conversations, right? Well BazaarVoice launched the Conversation Index earlier this year. The index has collected over 220 billion pieces of user-generated content (UGC) to calculate some rather “bazaar” stats ("The conversation index," 2012):

• Women contribute more UGC than men, and are generally more positive
• 1/3 of all Facebook reviews are collected on Fridays
• One in five reviews contains the word “love”

Conversations continue to increase, across a multitude of platforms and especially across several mobile devices, year over year. According to the study, keywords resonate among consumers, which directly correlate to where they are in the customer life cycle, specifically in the financial sector:

• We find that newer financial services customers (less than four years) tend to use “easy,” “helpful,” “awesome,” “happy,” and “experience” in their reviews.
• More tenured customers (10+ years with a firm) often use “courteous” and “convenient” in their reviews. Words that reverberate across all review content include “great” (highest, in about 18% of content), “friendly,” “quick,” and “simple.

It goes without saying that measuring conversations leads to the right business decisions in how content is tailored, which can help or hurt a brand’s bottom line.

You can find the full report in the SlideShare below.

The Conversation Index - Q3 Insights

View more presentations from Bazaarvoice

References:

Greenberg. (2009, October 20). Content is king of social marketing. Retrieved from http://multichannelmerchant.com/social-media/1020-content-social-marketing/

The conversation index. (2012). Retrieved from http://www.bazaarvoice.com/resources/research/conversation-index

Social media is a conversation. (2011, October 31). Retrieved from http://www.triplepundit.com/2011/10/social-media-conversation/  

ROI: Where Web Analytics and Social Media Meet

Everyone is always asking about ROI (Return on Investment) – and rightfully so. Marketers and their bosses need to see hard data that reflects how their efforts are gaining or losing business. When it comes to social media, it’s even more prevalent to know how social media campaigns are turning a profit for a brand.

An article posted on gigaom.com about 3 accurate metrics for ROI on social media campaigns discusses three distinct ways of measuring ROI:

1. Social Media Revenue Conversion: “a measure of how many people become customers through social media referral channels.” In other words, web tracking allows for the measurement of referrals from various social media sites, either through traceable links or shared campaigns through third party apps (Wildfire App).
2. Facebook engagement: “measures a brand’s ability to communicate successfully with their customers on the social network.” Similar to Google Analytics, Facebook Insights and a few other third party solutions tracks fan page engagement, content quality and overall sentiment
3. Social customer support metrics: “measure the impact of customer support on brand health and the cost of staffing a social support program.” Along with the previous point, customer support is key to providing real time response to customer inquiries, which directly correlates with how successful a brand is in social media. The more positive the sentiment, the greater potential for growth. The more negative the sentiment, the greater potential for failure and a negative sentiment with a brand’s audience.

Google Analytics Now Measures Social Interactions

While there is no direct way to create a social media effort and it automatically track its profit, Google Analytics has done a great job in developing a tool for measuring Social.

 

Its latest update now has the ability to calculate the “social value”, primarily when goals are E-commerce based, through a myriad of metrics and calculations.  

 

Its new tools incorporate various tracking parameters to measure conversions from social actions (Likes, Tweets, Shares, Pins, referral source, etc.), which then provides a value to said social actions.

Calculating Social Value

ConvinceandConvert.com has a great article, which details the new tool and measuring social value. 

With pre-determined goals setup, a brand can see how conversions are valued from top funnel to bottom funnel of the sales pipe.

Google’s Social Report allows marketers to see the full social value generated from social channels. According to Google Analytics blog:

“Social Value visualization compares the number and monetary value of all your goal completions against those that resulted from social referrals - both as last interaction, and assisted.

A visit from a social referral may result in conversion immediately or it may assist in a conversion that occurs later on. Referrals that lead to conversions immediately are labeled as Last Interaction Social Conversion. If a referral from a social source doesn’t immediately generate a conversion, but the visitor returns later and converts, the referral is included as an Assisted Social Conversion.”

 

The biggest takeaway from web metrics and social media is how a brand implements the various tools to measure its successes and areas of improvement. 

What we want to avoid is developing RAMs (Random Acts of Marketing), which can be costly mistakes. Worse off, they are immeasurable and can prove to be a short-term solution to a long-term problem.

Any smart marketer’s first step is to research and identify the proper tools that can measure the various points of a marketing campaign. Then, take things off from there.