SOCIAL MEDIA

Measuring and monitoring the value of social media strategies

By our News Team | 2021

Digital marketing has become possibly the top responsibility of marketers today, so they need to focus their strategies through social listening.

Marketers should ‘listen’ carefully across the full spectrum of social conversations about the brand and competitors. They can tune in more clearly to their audiences and respond with relevant social media campaigns. Importantly, listening will help focus the overall social media strategy and inform its key performance indicators.

Marketing budgets devote almost 60% towards digital, according to some estimates. So marketers are only too aware that developing consistent and creative social media campaigns is a critical part of the equation.

Dale Hefer, CEO of the Nedbank IMC marketing conference, says that without insightful user-centred monitoring, such campaigns can be sold short on the value and impact they create for the brand.

Photo by Camilo Jiminez @ Unsplash

It can be challenging to demonstrate how much these metrics are actually contributing to the company’s bottom line. How can one compare this to other strategies the company has invested in? If marketers cannot connect these activities to tangible returns, then there is little justification in engaging in those tasks.

Immediate feedback during and after events

The power of social media monitoring enables dynamic live feedback through its ability to capture and measure posts, comments and net sentiment in real time. The Nedbank IMC 2021 event monitored social media using local tracking platform amaSocial. This allowed the organisers to gauge the audience both during and after the event for immediate feedback.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the game changer for social media monitoring. Marketers in the global CMO Survey, for example, anticipate that using AI for prediction and measurement will triple over the next three years.

However, Petrumarié Jacobs, who is the Client and Brand Experience Manager at amaSocial, cautions: “Using AI, numerous social media monitoring platforms can ensure that their users have access to vast amounts of information. But if this is not expressed in usable formats it becomes hard for users to extract the value.”

In the CMO Survey, as many as 59% of marketing leaders reported increased pressure from their CEOs to quantify the value of their marketing efforts, making usable data extraction vital.

Source: Nedbank IMC marketing conference

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