How To Become Your Customers Friend

It has to make sense. We can't run around trying to track every single Key Performance Indicator that we can extract from Social Media, in a desperate attempt to justify it's use. It's already justified.
When social media blew up a couple of years ago, everyone thought it was free. Now I think it's safe to say that most executives have realized it's NOT free.
Qualified manpower, applications for your fan page, blog tools, prizes for contests and monitoring tools all ads up.

It's a swift of doing business. It shouldn't be treated as normal business, cus it's simply not.
In traditional business you pay 10 euros for marketing and plan on getting 20 back within a short period of time.
Social media is first of all a complete change of mentality that very few have yet understood. Almost a type of friendship. Like us, belong to us, follow us, check in with us...For what?
The easy way would say, for building a base of people to blast your marketing at.
The different way of doing business model would say - To create a bond. To be human. To get into their lives and have them let you be a part of theirs.

When we make friends we are humble. We listen to our friends, we don't yell. We invite them for a coffee, and in return they invite us back next time. If they treat us well we invite them for dinner at our house and when they need our help, we are by their side.
Friendship is not about exploiting eachother, trying to get the best and most out of the other person.
And friendship IS a win-win deal at the end.
This is what you want to ashieve as a brand doing business in a new and innovative way. You want to get invited to your customers home (their Facebook wall or Twitter feed), you want them to have your back and be loyal when a competitor offers them a better price. You want them to genuinely like you. Not change you for the first best option.
How do you do that? Be genuin, be nice, don't rush for the sale, be human, always over perform and happily surprise your customer, apologize if you mess up...

A KPI should be Online Reputation Management. How are people talking about us online?
A KPI should be engagement metrics, how are people sharing our content online?
A KPI should be referal traffic to your hub (website)
A KPI should be returning customers.

The sales come later, and maybe they´re not even direct sales. People are 71% more likely to purchase based on social media referrals. Maybe a person checks you out on twitter and 3 days later makes a sale because they had you in the back of your head, they were familiare with you already.

So do you engagement, be a brand evangelist, create a champion persona of your brand online, and the rest will come...Tweet

Social Media KPI´s

Brian Solis did some of the best sessions on this years Social Media Success summit and today I was browsing his website and found this article.
You Cant Measure What It Is You Do Not Value

Let´s talk about KPI´s today. Key Performance Indicators.
"Design outcomes and returns and integrate KPIs that capture progress, performance, and opportunities for optimization" Brian writes.
Progress, Performance and Opportunities - Increased brand awareness, Leads Sales and Loyalty I would interpret.

Return of investment could be Increase sales, Share of voice, Brand sentiment and many other things but how do we get there? How do we establish goals on the journey? What should we look for, measure, document and use to adjust or change our content and strategy so that we end up where we originally planned to?
The ROI itself is not having 150 comments per post instead of 35, that´s just an action, a result of great content but when the CEO asks you about the ROI that´s not going to be enough. But the number of comments is in fact one of many possible KPI.

Let´s lists some up here:

1. CTR (Click through Rate), Subscription rate, Unique visitors and Page views on blog. Google analytics can measure how well your blog is resonating within the community. Document each week or month the traffic. If it´s increasing - good. If not, maybe the content needs to be changed, maybe the design of the blog should be considered to change too? Lot´s of Page views but not an over whelming number of uniques? Means the content is good and people stick around to read for a while, but maybe you´re not promoting the blog well?

2. Number of comments on blog, retweets and mentions on Twitter, comments and likes on Facebook (Daily feedback in Facebook Insights), comments on discussion posts/news and groups on Linked In. Number of fans and followers, number of times people use your hashtags, fan generated posts, reviews and downloads. This is what I call engagement rates. This is also a good sign to know if you´re content is appreciated and if you´re on the right track.

3. Email subscription, registered users to group or forum and social media sharing

4. Influence. Through SocialMention or Google Alerts, measure the share of voice once per month. Share of voice in my book can be a KPI and sometimes part of the over all ROI too. If in fact one of the objective from the beginning was to Increase Brand Awareness then Share of voice is in fact not only a KPI but also a part of your ROI presentation.

"But my boss wants pure hard leads" you may think. Ok no problem but then some tracking tools will be necessary.
Google analytics and Bit.ly can help you with that. Specific campaign forms posted on blog or in the community, shorten the FB and TW links through Bit.ly and go back to track how many clicked on the links, put Google analytics on your FB Fan page, or simply ask those who contact you how they found you. Maybe add a Social Media button on the contact form?
I´m not a fan of over-selling or bombarding people with Buy-Our-Stuff messages but I would say that in at least 30% of your messages there should be a call-to-action. That´s 1 out of 3 weekly Facebook posts for example. The second post should be about something really valuable for your customer, something that can HELP him or her decide. It could be something that doesn´t even have anything to do with your company or your product but is helpful to your target customer. The third post should be FUN, fun and engaging. Hey, who doesn´t like to have a bit of fun?!

Hopefully these KPI´s can get you going in your quest to measure your social media efforts and if you do it right, tweek the content so that the KPI´s show you a positive result you should be on your way to glorious ROI too :-)

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