Can Small Businesses Measure The Success of Their Influence?

How do you measure success?

The social media revolution shows no sign of waning. According to statistics provided by Regus, Facebook has over 750,000,000 users – around 320,000,000 of whom are logged in on any given day. Regus’ findings also revealed that in the United States around 50% of all businesses use Twitter in order to broadcast their marketing campaigns.

Given that the number of people who use Twitter is about 70,000,000 every day, it’s easy to see the opportunities available, and your marketing strategy has the potential to reach an awful lot of people. However, it’s all very well trumpeting a campaign through social media but you need to know whether it’s succeeded or failed. Certainly there are big, expensive tools for major corporations to measure this by, but SMEs need to create their own metrics.

You don’t need money to get metrics

Certainly, the question of budget is one to consider but more and more small businesses and entrepreneurs are coming up with creative answers to this problem. Major corporations use software such as Radian6 through which to determine just how well or poorly a strategy has performed. Programs like these allow the user to track all the social media they are involved with, receive daily monitoring posts and manage their accounts in real time. While these solutions might not be available to SMEs, there are ways through which you can get a good idea of your ROI. Small business instead can use the free versions of Tweepi and Topsy to measure the amplification of their social media messages. You simply imput the URL you shared and the tool will return how many people have shared your status/tweets.

Coupons

One of the simplest solutions is to create a Facebook-only coupon or a Twitter-only offer. By separating the platforms through which you make these offers, you can get a good idea of just how far your strategy is reaching and have a definite metric through which to judge its success or failure.

Putting an expiration date on the coupon or offer is a good idea, as it will then give you a time period against which you can examine the results. Giving each platform its own offer means that you can separate the results into broad categories and get an idea of which platforms offer you the best reach.

Similarly, you can tailor your coupons for mobile-only access, giving a further idea of which demographic is the most likely to respond. It only takes something like a secret word or code to help you differentiate which groups are responding.

Free trials of a service

However, if these metrics aren’t enough for you then there are further ways through which the savvy SME owner can get an idea of how things are going. Beevolve is a social media monitoring and measurement software package that can give you a more detailed overview of who is interested in what you’re offering through the social media platforms. The problem for many entrepreneurs is that it does cost.

However, it is also available as a free trial, which cuts out after a fixed time. If you’re about to launch a marketing strategy then it might be worth downloading the trial version, reviewing the metrics within that time period and then canceling the subscription. After all, all’s fair in love and social media monitoring!

Carlo Pandian is a professional web marketer and freelance blogger. He also writes tutorials on QuickBooks accounting software by Intuit and loves to share social media tips with the entrepreneurial community of Lendio.The Success (or Failure) of Their Social Media Influence?