Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Do the Promoted Tweets and Sponsored Facebook Posts we see online really influence what we purchase when we sign off and head to the store? Datalogix, the data giant that tracks more than $1 trillion in consumer spending, is finding the answers for Twitter and Facebook.

Through a new advertising metric Twitter is calling "offline sales impact," it has been working with Datalogix to find out how brands' tweets--essentially miniature online ads--impact their offline sales.In preliminary studies with 35 brands, Datalogix found Twitter users who were exposed to a brand's tweets purchased more than users who didn't interact with a brand's tweets at all, regardless of whether they were Promoted Tweets or organic. Datalogix also found users who both followed a brand's Twitter account and were exposed to that brand's Promoted Tweets made nearly 30% more offline purchases.

The ongoing debate about the value of social media engagement remains unresolved. However efforts have been made to assess the value of social media as “earned media” and to assess the ROI of social media marketing. After applying these recent calculations to our business and to our clients’ businesses, we find the assessments reasonable. At the very least, these calculations create a starting point for analysis of individual business results. ...

...Naturally, it’s common sense that businesses want to see if their social media campaign is helping them reach their goals. Social media is all about the community which you do your business with, and actually has little to do with “media”. So in truth, if you are measuring your social media campaign, it must focus on and reveal insight about the members of your community and how engagement with them impacts your business.

Social media is a medium that works because it allows people to communicate with each other and it’s not about disruptive communication where you don’t have a say. With social media it is key to continuously evaluate and monitor what people are talking about that is relevant to your company and respond to them appropriately. There are hundreds of tools available that you can use to measure basically everything regarding your social media campaign, but in reality it’s a waste of resources, time, and money if you fail to monitor only selective metrics that matter to you.

There are many metrics you can use to measure your campaign and many of the tools that measure this will have their own metrics, but which actually matters? Find below a couple of metrics that I use as a baseline for all my social media campaigns....