Damien Mulley

It seems the experts that were at the IIA Congress last week didn’t know how to measure the success of a campaign inside Social Networks. Well here you go folks. For those that are hiring an Internet Marketing company in Ireland to do some social network marketing stuff and they don’t offer stats from the below methods then maybe you hired one of the many cowboy operations that slither around this area.

There are various elements in this and it all depends on which ones were incorporated into your campaign.

Check your website stats:

While Facebook is a walled garden and you can’t see inside it without logging in, they still send a lot of traffic out to websites. If you have set up a Facebook Profile, a Page, a Group or run Facebook “Social Ads” then they can all send users from Facebook to you. In addition so can anyone else in Twitter if they’re talking about you. For a marketing campaign you should have special website addresses tailored for the campaign so you know only your campaign elements are sending that traffic to your site. Google Analytics or any of the clones will allow you to measure incoming traffic from Facebook and you can tell if they are coming from profiles, ads, pages or groups.

Facebook Lexicon

Facebook Lexicon allows you to see what Facebook users have been discussing. It’s a keyword trend program that doesn’t show the number of times a keyword is mentioned but the number of people who mentioned the keyword one or more times over a certain period of time. More details on Facebook Lexicon here. For companies you can get an estimate of the number of times your brand or product is mentioned. Ideal to see are there jumps around the time you start a campaign. You can also compare up to five different keywords at the same time. But there’s a big but, it doesn’t give raw numbers so it’s just a rough estimate but it’s still good. Maybe you can purchase them from them though? Big marketing companies would probably pay for that.

Facebook Pages

I recently created a Facebook “Page” which is very much like a profile but for a company, brand, product. Instead of friending this Page, you “Fan” it. The Page was called “Gnéas” as a joke. When you become a fan, your friends also see you’ve become a fan of it as it shows up in their news feed. So a few people saw “Damien is a fan of Gnéas” and the viral element would have encouraged others to join too. The stats that are provided to Page owners are fairly good.

This is the Insights Control Panel (Everyone calls the stats Insights these days):

This is a graph of sign-up activity:

Some demographics of the Fans:

Facebook Social Ads

Read this Blog Post on how to run Social Ads. Like Pages there’s a whole section on statistics for your ads.

This is the Ads control panel. Note that the ads for the Gnéas page got canned because the Facebook prudes deemed the ads inappropriate:

Here’s how you can export all your data to Excel and add more calculations:

Facebook Apps

Many marketing campaigns will include the creation of special applications to get people to learn more about your brand/product. If you have an application created, Facebook will give you a whole load of information about installations and usage. Who, what, where, when etc. Data once again can be exported and presented to you.

Messy Measuring – Facebook Groups

Facebook Groups can be created by anyone and some do well and some stagnate. It takes a lot of work to keep activity going and Facebook really prefers if you use Facebook Pages to do marketing. They supply nice stat tools as mentioned above for Facebook Pages but nothing at all for Groups unless you pay a considerable sum for a sponsored Group. But you can manually check your group and measure it. Measuring it is a case of seeing how many have signed up for the Group and what the activity is like. So for example, the Bertie, Take Enda With You group:

You can see how many members there are. Then you can see what kind of activity is happening by counting the number of discussions, photos and videos that have started/ were added.

And you can also look at the Wall activity.

As I said, nothing that’s automated and more work but still data that’s valuable. Other measurements to take into account are the number of people that respond to messages that you send to the whole Group. See what the response rate is like. Don’t be surprised if it’s very very low.

I hope this was useful. Shall I do one on Bebo next?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 20th, 2008 at 12:07 pm and is filed under business, Facebook, irishblogs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.