Measuring Social Media Effectiveness

Now that many planning projects have launched their social media campaigns and are moving in the direction of actively managing a web presence to maintain open online dialogue platforms for public engagement, its time to evaluate what can be done to effectively measure their success rates. It is difficult to benchmark respective activity in the social media realm, as performance is measured differently. This is especially true due to the fact that social media is so versatile, diverse, complex and multi-faceted, spanning many disparate objectives and many different platforms.

We recently came across an example of a simplistic and flexible framework for measurement that we believe can help planners evaluate their social media activity more effectively and consistently. This framework is designed to be applied across a broad spectrum of social media platforms and give those evaluating the success of their current social media campaigns the freedom to use their own experience and expertise to choose the most appropriate variables.

TMI, a firm specializing in finding a deeper engagement in social media, teamed up with the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) to devise a measurement framework for their clients based on a  process of establishing the campaign’s intent and assigning the most pertinent variables.  according to the 4 As – Awareness, Appreciatation, Action and Advocacy – and consulting other benchmarks in order to draw meaningful comparisons. Which variables you choose to apply will fundamentally vary according to the intent you define, the platform you’re using (ie. Facebook, Twitter, Blog, etc) the tracking you have in place and the internal expectations of various stakeholders.  

To take a closer look at TMI’s measurement approach using IAB’s framework, view Slide Presentation >>