Measurement

Reality checked in with me recently when a few parents on my son’s rowing team, knowing my affiliation with PR News, asked me to write the press releases for the club. Sure, it’ll be easy,… Continued

Measuring reach on Facebook has become far more complex than simply using one metric to count how many people witnessed a piece of content. A mix of different KPIs must be considered in tandem to determine where, how and why users are seeing (or not seeing) your brand’s Facebook content, according to Karen Vega, senior director of social media activations and earned media at Viacom Velocity.

When I ask my friends in PR what they’d do with a bigger budget, their first instinct is to smile that “yeah, right!” smile. It’s hard enough to keep the budget they have much less… Continued

Many social media teams lament that they don’t have enough budget, headcount or support to have a real impact on the business. Yet it’s often these same teams that fail to connect the dots. Your senior leaders don’t care about likes and retweets, they care about impact on business results. Here’s a four-step process on how to frame the discussion and speak their language to get more headcount and budget for social.

Communicators and marketers know the elephant in the room with Snapchat is that you can’t measure it. Wrong, argues Carmen Collins of Cisco, who not only has launched an extensive Snapchat effort at the company but also measures it. In this article she provides step-by-step directions so you, too, can measure Snapchat.

Facebook Insights provides a wealth of demographic data and offers a window into what kinds of posts resonate the most. But Insights reports can also contain an overwhelming amount of data. To avoid drowning in a sea of irrelevant metrics, Kathleen Lukasik, vice president of social analytics at Ogilvy, advises clients to break down their goals into bite-size pieces before reading through Facebook Insights reports. At PR News’ Digital Boot Camp June 23 in Chicago, Lukasik laid out four steps to setting KPIs before sitting down to read through Insights results.

For many businesses, leads and sales are primary KPIs. But before you can track sales, you have to generate them—and standing out from the crowd on social media is no easy task. Online consumers can anticipate when ads are coming and know when and how to skip them. Fortunately, major platforms, including Facebook, Snapchat and Pinterest, continue to develop new technologies to help generate and track sales, helping to prove the ROI of social media ads.

Marketers are trained to watch engagement, track reach, respond to comments and keep an eye out for influencers on social media. But above and beyond how many shares and click throughs a post receives, the question your senior leaders really want to know is, “What’s the ROI of your social media efforts?” If you want more budget, headcount or respect within your organization, then you better have an answer to that question.

Instagram video has become useful and powerful content for strategic communicators. In much the same way as photos, Instagram users can like, share and comment on videos. For clients and organizations new to Instagram, the likes, shares and comments can give a marketing and PR team data about how a client’s or organization’s content is performing. Plus, these simple metrics can provide insight into what could be done to improve them.

How do you create the perfect dashboard? Does such a thing exist? And if so, will it change your life as a communicator? Probably not, Katie Paine of Paine Publishing and Johna Burke of BurrellesLuce say during PR News’ Measurement Conference in Washington, D.C. Dashboards can make your life easier and should, but they’re not the silver bullets of PR. The human element and the insights you can glean from dashboard are far more important, they say.