Knol will be discontinued on Tue, 01 May 2012 07:00:00 GMT. Learn more.

Measuring the Buzz - Social Media Measurement Best Practices

Social Media Measurement Best Practices for Destination & Tourism Marketers

Social media is hot. It now an essential part of the marketing efforts for many tourism organizations and destinations. However, social media is often undertaken with little planning, integration with other marketing programs and most importantly, measurement and review of its impact, influence and return on investment. This article introduces for best practices for monitoring, measuring and managing your social media activities.

Chris Adams, Director of Online Marketing, Miles Media with Erin Francis – Cummings/Dave Bratton of Destination Analysts and Arianna Petkevicius of GoSeeTell.

Also see:  Social Media Monitoring Tools for Destinations:  http://knol.google.com/k/social-media-monitoring-for-destinations#edit 

And the list of resources at the end of this knol including a list of leading white papers on social media measurement & ROI added in October 2010. 


“All marketers are now publishers – creators and facilitators of content, conversation and community”

John Battelle, Wired Magazine Co-Founder 


Social media is hot.  This type of “conversational marketing” including monitoring, engaging and facilitating an online community is now a core part of marketing for many tourism organizations and destinations. However, according to a 2009 Mzinga & Babson Executive Education study, over 80% of marketers do not measure ROI for their company’s social media programs. But like all other parts of online marketing, social media needs to be monitored, measured and managed - to maximize the effectiveness of your marketing and your return on investment. 

'Social media is free" is one of the myths about social media. Though many social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter cost nothing in set up and licensing, social media marketing is not free. Success takes time, effort and expertise and social media efforts should be integrated with, tracked and measured as part of your overall marketing mix.


This introduction to best practices in social media measurement will review the topic in four parts:   

  1. A Social Media Measurement Framework
  2. The 3 Areas for Social Media Measurement
  3. Social Media Research
  4. Social Media Best Practices from Analytics & Research

 

1. Social Media Measurement Framework

Any social media measurement efforts should have framework to ensure success. This includes having a clear plan for your social media marketing efforts, assessing and benchmarking against past and competitor’s activities, integrating social media with your other online (and offline) marketing programs, using campaign tracking to monitor and measure, report on progress and review and refine your efforts based on results

a.  Social Media Plan

i. Marketing & Promotion

ii. Customer Service

iii. Feedback & Research

iv. New Product Development

    For each purpose you should have a clear plan with objectives or Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) which are defined and measureable. Make sure the plan is reviewed and updated regularly based on your reporting (see “Review and Refine’”below).

    Figure 1. 


    Social media can leverage your overall brand or organization's objectives or be more campaign specific. For each type of social media marketing it is important to have a clear plan and a framework for judging success. Arianna Petkevicius, GoSeeTell

    b. Benchmarking Your plan should be based in part on reviewing the social media marketing activities of competitors or other “leading” organization against which you can judge yourself. These could be nearby or further afield, many innovative online marketing ideas can be found in internationally.

Figure 2. 
    Analyzing your competitors' social media activities using tools like Swix and TweetStats can provide important objectives or comparisons in social media measurement and reporting.


    c. Integrate Your Social Media Efforts  Ensure your social media marketing efforts, including how you measure success, is integrated with your overall marketing programs. Make sure there is clear visibility - all staff and vendors understand your plan, objectives and the common measurements by which you will judge success. You can do this by ensuring you measure against consistent metrics for all marketing campaigns  including SEM, email marketing and social media activities. These are common metrics including audience, engagement and conversion or goal events – which can be viewed as “Signals of Intent to Travel” (SITs). Commonly used  ‘core’ metrics include visits, bounce rates, page views per visit and SITs such as ordering guides, signing up for emails, viewing a hot deals or clicking through to a booking engine. Full integration with a booking engine is of course the ‘ultimate’ Signal of Intent to Travel – however, a range of other actions can also be important indicators.  These metrics will be complimented by social media specific metrics or tools that you are using to measure influence, frequency and your ‘viral impact’. However, using a set of core measurements ensure some consistency in reporting across the full range of marketing programs.

    d. Track Everything!  An important part of your social media framework should be a system of campaign tracking codes. These codes are unique identifiers that can be placed at the end of web links and identify to your analytics tools these respondents as being related to a specific social media program. From this you can understand not just the quantity of social media activity (visits or views) but also their quality - including key metrics such as bounce rates and conversion ratios (the percent of respondents completing a set of specific goals or Signals of Intent to Travel).

For example if you are placing a link on a Facebook Wall to a deals page on your site:

www.dmowebsite.com/dealpage01

By simply adding a unique identifier or tracking code at thee end of the URL you can measure the impact and behavior of respondents, allowing you to assess the impact and results of specific social media efforts.

www.dmowebsite.com/dealpage01?utm_source=Facebook01


    e. Clear, actionable reporting Make sure you regularly review and report on the results of social media marketing activities.  This should consist of ongoing tactical review of key social media reporting tools by staff or vendors including your web reporting solution such as Google Analytics and specialist tools such as Facebook’s Insight reporting. This type of review should be extremely regular – weekly or even more frequently – allowing your social media contributors to see what is engaging with your community and what is not. More formalized reporting can compliment this - perhaps, bi weekly or monthly – allowing a bigger picture view of the program and its impact and results.  Integrate this reporting with the rest of your online marketing programs using consistent metrics where possible.  Most important, make sure your reporting is clear, easy to understand and actionable. Organize regular review sessions, both with staff and vendors working on the program, but also critically with key managers to help them interpret and gain insights from your social media reporting.

    f. Review and Refine. Critical to a successful social media marketing program is the ability to act on your measurement and reporting. This it he final part and arguably the most important part of your social media measurement framework – the ability to take immediate action – improving, refining or replacing social media activities. “Learn to fail fast” – if a social media element fails to engage – review your reporting, including feedback from your community and move on and try alternatives approaches or ideas. 

  

2. The 3 Areas for Social Media Measurement

Your social media measurement should monitor, assess and report on r your activities in each of the following areas

a.  Social Media Interactions on your site. This includes any social media features on your own site plus user generated content such as commenting on an article or listing or submitting a photo or video.  

b. Social Media Interactions to or from your Site. This includes users sharing content from your site to their Facebook, Twitter or other social media account etc. or clicking on a link from a social media platform to visit your site. 

c. Social Media Interactions that take place entirely off your site. For many social media marketing efforts this may be the bulk of the activity generated by a program. This includes tracking and measuring not only top line activity numbers (e.g.: the number of Facebook fans or Twitter followers) but of critical importance the quality of this engagement including the frequency of interaction, its influence and the broader viral impact of the program.


Figure 3.
Measuring all types of social media interactions on, to/from and off your web site are important. 

 

3. Social Media Research

Analytics no matter how complete can only offer a partial view of your social media marketing activities. Analytics is strong at telling you the “What” and the “When” – what social media programs generated activity and when. Research adds additional insights – adding the “Why.” Why did specific social media content or initiatives work when other programs failed? What competitors or competitive destinations are also being considered? What factors will impact a travelers’ purchase decision? And, most importantly, did social media actually influence your online fans or friends to book and travel?

Social media research can be informal, immediate and very tactical or more formalized and methodical in its approach. Both types of research are important.

For ongoing tactical research you can view comments, posts and other feedback and ask questions on particular issues or potential opportunities (but be careful not to overdo this). You can also run quick no cost or low cost surveys – for example, Facebook has a simple survey available or you can post a link to a low cost online survey tool such as SuveyMonkey, Vovici or CVent.

More formalized research can consist of multiple approaches and can include:

    a. Sentiment Analysis – where analytics meets research. This type of ongoing research summarizes feedback, issues and topics in the social media dialogue (both on your platforms and more broadly on the wider web) and look for trends and meaning and by formally analyzing this feedback. Specialist enhanced social media monitoring tools (such as Radian6 or ScoutLabs) are typically used for this type of analysis.

    b. Online Surveys and Interviews. More formalized surveys of follower and fans can be undertaken through an online survey (quantitative research) and/or in-depth interviews seeking attitudes, intentions and feedback.

    c. Conversion Studies.  An extension of an online survey is to probe on the issue of influence and actual visitation.  A conversion study seeks to assess the impact and influence of the social media program on actual visitation and from this calculate the actual visitation and expenditure influenced by the program and hence it’s Return on Investment. For these types of studies in particular it is wise to use a credible and independent research company with a sound understanding of conversion studies and economic impact and ROI analysis.

The social media best practices below are based on one of the first significant and comprehensive social media research studies undertaken for the State of Louisiana by Destination Analysts and including a review of analytics and an online intercept survey, in depth interviews and a conversion study component.  


  4. Social Media Best Practices from Research and Analytics  

Based on the results of a major social media conversion study undertaken for the State of Louisiana, combined with a review of analytics for these social media program we have developed the following XX specific best practices in social media marketing.

a. Overall Summary of Social Best Practices. 

i. Social media users are explicitly open to having social media content effect their travel planning including destination selection. 

ii. Social media is highly competitive in travel and tourism. Both Twitter and Facebook users tend to follow multiple, competing tourism organizations including destinations. 

iii. Building trust from consumers takes time and depends on the perception of the organization and consistency over time. Therefore, tourism organization should maintain a consistently credible voice (and overall environment) in its social media marketing. Regular meetings, training and developing a clear set of guidelines for everyone involved in social media to follow is critical.

iv. Social Media Content must be timely, relevant, exciting and unique. “Insider”-type content is highly desired. When posting new content, focus on activities, events and discounts, but have lots of relevant variety.

v. Respondents in the research study favored using an organization’s formal identity to other options such as an individual working for the organization.

vi. Re-tweeting or reposting travel or destination related content is likely to be a small proportion of super-users.

vii. Twitter and Facebook users want a destination or tourism organization to post a wide variety of content; however this content should always be relevant to travel planning.

viii. Where possible social media marketing communications should be customized to users’ specific interests or behavior. Links to deals relevant to different audience (e.g.: family, couples) is one simple example of this.

xi. First impressions count. Though most social media platforms limit your design customization – where possible create impact and immediate appeal. Don’t neglect page design considerations and make the design consistent with your overall brand.

 
b. Twitter - Specific Best Practices

 i. Twitter is primarily used to keep tabs on what’s going on in a tourism organization or a destination, so this should be top of mind in developing a communications strategy.

ii. Tweet regularly. Twitter followers want frequency as well as relevance and timeliness. Once or more a day is okay - with several times a week a minimum for most organizations.

iii. Tweet about events, deals and other time sensitive happenings far enough in advance for followers to plan a leisure trip.

iv. Build and foster connection, but don't just ask questions. While some users are happy to provide feedback, comments and ideas – most social media followers are primarily passive recipients of information.

v. For many tourism sectors, Twitter has a strong business to business bias. Use Twitter to speak to your business audiences – or establish a separate Twitter account focused on their needs.

vi. Reply to followers via Twitter, but don’t shy away from private messages in an attempt to create a public conversation.

vii. Describe links to external content—such as videos and audio files—clearly.
 

c. Facebook Best Practices

i. A tourism organization or destination’s Facebook presence will be primarily used as a source of travel inspiration, but as a secondary use - may be used in a more specific trip planning roll (e.g.: detailed deals, event calendar, links to maps etc).

ii. Facebook fans prefer less frequent updates vs. Twitter. Post so that fans actively feel connected, but use caution in posting too frequently.  Post on a daily basis at most.

iii. Think beyond the wall. Facebook fans are increasingly seeking richer, more contextual content in specific areas – add additional tabs, content and widgets.

iv. Engage. Regular upkeep of a destination’s Facebook discussions and other tabs/pages is crucial.

v. Other Links and Resources. Be sure to offer clear information on how to contact your organizations or destination, such as telephone numbers, links to your website, visitor guide order forms and other useful features or planning tools.

vi. Keep personal interest posts to a minimum.

 

Resources and Links.  






  • Louisiana Office  of Tourism, Social Media Effectivness Study, Destination Analysts, February 2010. Contact the Office of Tourism for what additional information may be available publicly on the study. 
 
  
  
  • GoSeeTell's Twitter Rankings.  Martin Stoll and the team at GoSeeTell pioneered the innovative  'Twisitor center' solution with Travel Portland & are tracking other DMOs active in this space: http://twisitorcenter.com . See Martin's Blog for regular 'Twitter Rankings' of US destinations: http://www.goseetell.com/blog/
 
  • "How Social is Your DMO ?"  Dave Serino of Gammet Interactive has developed a 12 point rating system for DMOs based on their presence on various  social media platforms. See it at Dave's Blog: http://www.daveserinoblogs.com/blog/

Comments

Chris Adams
@ the intersection of Travel & New Media. at Miles Media
Colorado
Article rating:
Your rating:

Categories

Activity for this knol

This week:

39pageviews

Totals:

3643pageviews
©2009 Google