Since 2009, when social media came to the attention of marketers as another channel to reach customers/members, the idea has been to push messages out through Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other social media channels. In the beginning, the idea of putting a contest on Facebook to get “Likes” was used to attract more followers. Twitter followers were harder to attract because news about where you would be for a community event or a special offer were not interesting to consumers. Putting a video or television commercial on YouTube was a way to try to build interest, but many videos were amateurish and TV commercials were “too commercial!”
More organizations are trying to find the right mix of interesting content and wanting to create a community around their brands, but two things are still obstacles:
- Consumers are not willing to have marketing messages interrupt their feeds
- The return on investment (ROI) is still elusive and it is hard to connect marketing budget and personnel time to actual product sales
Why not just avoid social media and focus on other channels? The key is that not showing up at all can be considered “Out of sight, out of mind!”
So, if you are to continue to post on social media, measuring success is important to validate the expenditure of budget and time. Here are ideas that are helpful from Jonathan Lay in a blog post for measuring the success of your videos on YouTube:
- Views: This is simply the number of times a person has clicked “play” to watch the video. Distribution channels and how you drive traffic to your video will greatly impact this metric.
- Play Rate: This is calculated by taking the total number of plays divided by the total number of times the video has been uniquely loaded by an individual. Creating a compelling thumbnail should help you to increase this number.
- Engagement: This is simply defined as those who watched a certain percentage of the video. If your video is engaging and resonates with the intended audience, their engagement should remain steady. The length of your video will also contribute to this metric.
- Action Taken: This can be tracked and calculated if you have a specific call-to-action during the video that takes them to a specific landing page. If there is a compelling offer along with a single call-to-action, you can measure the effectiveness of action taken by using a Google campaign URL.
- Lead Scoring: If an individual watches a certain percentage of a video, a score can be attributed for this behavior and used as part of a larger digital lead scoring strategy. This relates back to the video’s story and the audience’s engagement.
If you want to explore more ways to be effective in social media or within digital marketing, contact us at LemmonTree. Let’s see how you can make it more efficient and measurable for your marketing success!