Hi @phcreative, how do we get beyond quantitative and into qualitative measures of social media performance? And should we? #AskPh

Question asked by @Wirral_Chamber

Wirral Chamber, there’s a smart cookie working for you because this is a brilliant question.

So we want to look at qualitative results in social media rather than quantitative well so basically rather than lots of likes and lots of retweets and follows blah blah blah you want to really get to the business end and start measuring social media in terms of how much value is it adding your business. That’s the smart way to approach social media.

Just a few years ago, people said social media is really hard to measure, what’s the ROI on social media? And do you know what it wasn’t easy question to answer, but now there is no excuse, there is more than you need in terms of technology to be smart with how you measure your actions and in terms of strategy, it’s very, very simple to achieve. You’ve just got to understand what success is for your business. Most people fail to do this — link their business objectives and their business strategy to what they do in the digital space and it really is as simple as working out — ‘Okay, from social media

we want to engage with X number, maybe in terms of Wirral Chamber, of Wirral local business who aren’t currently members of the Wirral Chamber and we want to capture their contact details because we know the conversion rate of how many become members’. So a really good qualitative measure for social media is how many new relationships you create a month.

Then if they engage with your website and they respond to your email marketing. This is just simple funnel measurement now, how many convert from a new relationship to a contact to a qualified prospect into a brand new member. That is all you need to focus on and that’s just one business objective, I’m sure you’ve got many more. But the clarity needed to get qualitative results on social media is understanding what success looks like in your business and just reverse engineer it. Start with the end in mind, understand what success looks like and don’t compromise, don’t be satisfied with 50 retweets and 700 likes etc, focus on the bottom line. That’s exactly the smart play from a social media point-of-view so smart cookie in Wirral Chamber. Good luck with that.