How To Measure Social Media Activities

It doesn’t take long before the topic of measurement comes up in my conversations with winery owners and general managers about social media. Since I’m a believer that anything worth doing should be measured, I thought I would offer up some ideas about how to measure the impact of blogs, podcasts and social networking campaigns.

Since social media is online, website engagement metrics are the first place to start. For example, you can set objectives and measure number of visitors, time spent on site, bounce rates, RSS feed subscriptions, newsletter sign-ups, blog comments and so forth. If you have a podcast, free services like Feedburner can provide you with downloads as well as gives you a way to deliver content via email. Another good email newsletter service is Feedblitz who also has some interesting reader metrics built in. Social media guru Jeremiah Owyang keeps a good list of links to most every social media metrics company over at his blog but many are priced out of reach of medium and small wineries.

But measuring traffic and actions taken by website visitors or podcast listeners is only the tip of the iceberg. To really assess if your social media activities are driving results you need to directly link them to measurable outcomes. A good one for most wineries is tasting room visitors since it’s one of the basic metrics wineries keep track of. This is because the more visitors you have, the higher your wine sales tend to be. It also helps to drive wine club sign-ups.

So how can a blog and/or podcast drive visitors?

Post a coupon to your blog for a discount. Give out an discount code on your podcast. Offer something that will influence a visit like free tasting if you have a fee or an upgrade to your reserve tasting for the regular price. You could also enhance the customer experience by offering a winemaker tasting exclusively to blog readers or an exclusive sampler pack. Whatever you choose to do, it needs to be meaningful enough to provoke action from your target customers.

Once this is in place there is one more thing that needs to be measured; the online conversation. This is relatively easy these days with free services like Google Alerts and communities like Yelp but it requires regular monitoring so you can respond directly to the conversation.

Since the measurement part is fairly straightforward, I advise clients to spend time thinking about which customer segments and what actions they would like to see before agreeing on objectives to measure. I also set expectations that social media takes time to build momentum but the results can provide stunning ROI.

Related posts:

1. Social Media for Wineries 1
2. The Social Media Press Release
3. What is social media?
4. What Every Winery Should Know About Social Media
5. Added Date: What Every Winery Should Know About Social Media

Tagged as: metrics, social media, tools & techniques