Hannon Hill - Enterprise Web Content Management

If you ask communication specialists and marketers about their main challenges with regard to their inbound marketing strategy in general and their social media strategy in particular, most of them would put ROI measurement at the top of their list. There are multiple reasons why social analytics are so important. First, social media campaigns require a significant amount of resources, so as a marketing manager or communications director, you want to make sure that they’re a worthwhile investment. Second, you need to ensure that your team has enough data points available to be able to optimize their campaigns and be even more efficient and effective. Third, you would like to be able to determine the impact that your social media strategy has on your reputation and on how your organization is perceived, and you might also want to analyze how you measure up against other organizations.

It’s clear why you should obtain and, more importantly, interpret social media analytics, but why is the process not that easy?

• The data is all over the place. Due to the large spectrum of social media channels and applications, it can be a daunting task to track analytics data for each one. In addition, looking at one social media channel in isolation doesn’t give you the holistic picture that you need for your ROI calculations. That’s where a web marketing tool can come in handy if it has the ability to pull in analytics data from your social channels and at the same time help you understand the correlation between your social media campaigns, your web traffic, and your conversion rates.
• Attribution is tricky. Without a web marketing tool, it is virtually impossible to follow all of the clicks made by a visitor turned lead (a lead being defined as someone who identified themselves on your site by filling out a form) that eventually lead to a sale (which could be a donation pledge, a new student enrollment, etc). Let’s think of the following scenario: You decide to host an open house event, so you create a nice landing page with a sign-up form. Next, you promote your event on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. A prospective student clicks on one of the links on your social posts and visits the landing page, but doesn’t sign up immediately. Next, you write a blog post about your event, containing some additional information, such as the announcement of an interesting guest speaker. You promote your post via social media. Now, your prospective student goes to your post, reads it, and then clicks on the link to the landing page where he signs up for the Open House. As you can see, without proper tools, you would probably not be able to track down the trail of clicks that led to the sign-up.
• It’s still a relatively new “thing”. Since social media, as much as it has taken the marketing world by storm, is still an evolving phenomenon, new technologies and applications continue to emerge, both in terms of social media applications and analytics tools to compile and interpret the data.
• Some things are difficult to measure. This may be an obvious statement, but social media is good for more than just sales. For instance, communicating with your students and prospective students via social media can result in improvements to your processes, your offerings, and your student (and staff) satisfaction. Empowering your communications team to engage with students, faculty, staff, parents, and even media outlets via social media can also boost employee morale, since we are all social beings who enjoy interaction. So even if you have all of your social analytics data at your fingertips, you still need to factor the above components into the equation in order to get a comprehensive understanding of your overall social media ROI.

But just because it’s challenging doesn’t mean that you should give up on social analytics. In fact, since the insights gained from your metrics can have a significant impact on all aspects of your organization, I would recommend investing in ROI calculations and analytics interpretation.

We understand the challenges associated with social analytics, which is why we built a tool to help our customers solve some of those issues. Don’t worry, we’re not trying to up-sell our product. It’s a solution that is available free of charge to Cascade customers, and it's called Spectate. Contact us if you would like to see a demo. We’re here to help.