USING SOCIAL MEDIA IS JUST not optional anymore for many marketing, communications, PR, and web professionals working at colleges and universities. While Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, and LinkedIn as well as other social networking websites were only used by a small group of institutions just two years ago, they have now become default communication platforms for the majority in trying to reach and engage students, alums, and other constituents on their terms and at a minimum cost.
Things go fast with the social web—so fast that only a minority of institutions have taken the time to set proper measurement systems to assess the results of their new communication tool set. Yet tracking results has never been so important. At a time when countless self-proclaimed social media experts want to dictate new rules of engagement to optimize your institution’s social media footprint, skipping the measurement part is a risky proposition.
Whether or not they include stats on your page or channel, most social media platforms won't provide a full picture.
Using social media doesn’t require big budgets. But success on the social web can only be achieved at the price of major time commitments. Unfortunately, there is no guarantee that time spent on Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, and LinkedIn is always well spent.
So how do you make sure you don’t waste your time? Start by following these steps to set up a simple social media measurement system for your institution.
What Can Be Measured?
Facebook
Facebook provides extensive analytics to page administrators. With your Insights Page, you can track over time the following metrics: total fans, unsubscribers and resubscribers, new and removed fans, top countries, age and gender demographics, page views, media (photo, audio, and video) consumption, interactions (total number of comments, wall posts, and likes), post quality, click-through and engagement rates, discussion posts, and reviews.
1. Define measurable goals for social media activities.
Clear goals make the difference between strategy and mere tactics. Try to spell out what you want to achieve by using social media. Do you want to raise the yield of your admitted students’ pool? Do you want to increase connections among your alums to help them find jobs? Do you want to reduce the time your staff spends addressing basic questions from prospective students and their parents? When you define high-level goals, make sure they can be measured and really matter to the institution.
Determine how you will measure success—and failure. This involves selecting metrics that will tell how your initiatives perform. Key performance indicators should be very specific. For example, in the case of connections among alums used earlier, it makes sense to track the total number of interactions (wall posts, comments, etc.) related to career issues on your Facebook page or your LinkedIn group. If you use Twitter to address questions from prospective students or their parents by directing them to resources on the institution’s website or Facebook page, you will need to track the click-through rate on these links along with the total number of e-mails and phone calls related to these topics that staff members receive.
3. Plan ahead and properly set up the right measurement tools.
While Facebook and YouTube provide a wide range of metrics about your page or channel, Twitter and LinkedIn don’t. And whether or not they include statistics, most social media platforms won’t provide the full picture. If you need to track click-through rates to the links you share on your different outposts in social media land, consider using a tracking tool such as HootSuite or BudURL, or set up your own with Get Shorty or the WordPress Short URL Plugin.
Moreover, if you’re trying to measure any type of conversions on your institution’s website, you should also use URLs that identify at least the medium and the campaign. Such web addresses include parameters that can be read by the analytics applications and will help in tracking web visitors referred by your social media initiatives.
4. Capture the data at preset intervals.
Once the right tools have been selected, it’s time to get started with implementation of initiatives. Given the very dynamic nature of social media, plan to capture measurement data at preset intervals—every hour, every day, every week, every month, etc.—depending on the type of activities. This “on-the-fly” measurement will help you make necessary adjustments quickly and ensure a record of the full life cycle of your video, slideshow, or post. Once again, Facebook and YouTube have made life easier by offering easy access to archived data, which should help save some time. With Twitter, you will have to keep track of your metrics on your own.
