Measuring the success of an event takes event metrics. Measuring social media for events takes social media metrics relevant to event goals. This was my topic of discussion at EventTech 2014 in Las Vegas last week, providing the answers to many questions event marketers have about social ROI.
Having a good analytics program in place starts with a measurement plan. This is essentially a roadmap of cascading business goals to social media goals and specific tactics, with assigned metrics. It can be organized by the promotion period of an event. Here’s an example mapping:
- Pre-event Business Goal: Registration
- Pre-event Social Media Goal: Drive registration page visits
- Social Metric: 500 Registration page views from social media sources measured in Google Analytics
Once your measurement plan is mapped out we can begin reporting on the stuff that matters. What matters to an executive varies from the information the team doing the work can use to improve their execution. So, we want our executives to receive a roll-up of around one to three metrics relevant to their business goals in a key performance indicator (KPI) report. This should have a year-over-year or month-over-month data point if available. A social KPI report provides information in an executive summary sparing the details of number of likes on a specific message and wide swings in data that happen daily or weekly.
“The devil is in the details” as they say and execution is everything in digital. That’s why tactical, detailed reporting is important to those doing the work, meaning your community manager. Seeing a daily or weekly snapshot of what messages and photos performed well in social media, as well as realtime listening, is critical to getting the job done. This takes tools, so don’t hesitate to make at least a small investment in a social media management platform.
Now that you have a rundown of how we approach social media measurement for events, actually to all of our marketing projects, take a look at my presentation on Slideshare. It provides a list of common social media metrics for events, more agency methodology, and a list of the tools we personally use in our toolbox.
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