Why You Need To Measure The Value of Social Media

Why You Need To Measure The Value of Social Media

There is debate on whether businesses can measure the value of social media. On one side are those who argue that social media is an intangible and while it brings benefits to business, there is just no way to measure them.

I sit firmly on the opposite side of that debate – having worked in online marketing, SEO and all things digital for most of the last 15 years, measuring the results of activity is expected and an inherent part of all marketing activities online. For me, it is natural to look for a way to measure the effectiveness of any activity and to be skeptical about anything that isn’t measured.

It is in this vein that I’ve spoken about the need to measure the value and effectiveness of social media and looked for methods to inform any social media strategies or plans.

A recent presentation at Social Media Women in Sydney outlines these views on Measuring the Value of Social Media in further detail.

As with any online marketing activity, the business objectives should drive the activity and define the goals and measures of effectiveness. Define what success looks like and measure whether social media is contributing to achieving it.

How Successful Australian Brands Use Facebook

How Successful Australian Brands Use Facebook

In a recent report – How The Largest Australian Organisation Use Social Media – we studied 500 of Australia’s largest organisations. One of our key findings was that Facebook is by far the most popular social media platform when measured by number of followers. The organisations we studied had a total of 4.4 million followers, more than three times the following of Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube combined.

When we looked further into the details of the large following on Facebook we discovered that a very small number of companies account for almost half of these followers, in fact 2% of the companies studied account for 49% of the following.

Our analysis found a number of similarities in the companies with the largest numbers of followers, some specific uses of Facebook were found to be the biggest difference between the companies with the largest following and the remaining organisations. These methods can be used by any business that wants to use Facebook effectively.

Christmas Email Campaign Tips

Christmas Email Campaign Tips

With Christmas fast approaching, if you haven’t finished planning your upcoming Christmas campaigns, here are some pointers for getting the most out of the next few weeks.

Think about the customer’s context:

While in many circumstances, past behaviour is a good predictor of future behaviour, when it comes to Christmas shopping, consumer behaviour can be less easy to plan for. As email recipients are likely to be looking for gifts, their buying patterns and what is likely to trigger them to react, is likely to be different to what would motivate them to purchase goods for themselves.

In this example, Just Jeans has provided a quick route for shoppers to find gifts based on age, gender and price range, in addition to the usual navigation bar that appears at the top of all their regular emails.

If you have behavioural data from last Christmas season, use this to inform the personalisation if at all possible. In absence of this data, it is a great time to test what will work for your list recipients at this time of year.

Harvey Norman eCommerce Review

Harvey Norman eCommerce Review

Last month Harvey Norman announced the launch of their eCommerce website. We’ve had a look and thought we’d share our first thoughts. Harvey Norman have focused on the key functionality and have ticked most of the boxes to effectively sell online. Harvey Norman aren’t pushing the boundaries of eCommerce and we wouldn’t expect them to given their late entry to online retail and the very public anti online sentiment from Gerry Harvey in the past.

The biggest and most important change to Harvey Norman’s website is that you can now purchase online and this is done using the standard shopping cart and checkout approach. Other key eCommerce functionalities we looked at are:

Product Reviews – These are a new feature on the Harvey Norman website. User reviews are really important, customers trust other customers. Research has shown that reviews – even negative ones- have a positive impact on sales.

Rich media – Harvey Norman haven’t gone for innovative or boundary-pushing media such as augmented reality or a rich experience with video, they’ve stuck to the basics. They have implemented a few basic but neat features on the product pages including buying guides and the ability to submit product-specific questions.

Up-sell – there is up-sell on the website at both the product pages and in the shopping cart through specific and related items such as cables and mounting brackets for TV’s and the obligatory care policy for electrical products. This is a key area for increasing the average order value and good to see that Harvey Norman have implemented this in a meaningful way by displaying very relevant products.

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