Measuring effectiveness of social media efforts

I find marketing a bit difficult to grasp but it is becoming increasingly important for libraries and information organizations because there is more competition but less money. Social media seems like such a cost effective way for marketing. Although the service might be free, keeping social media sites upto date and interesting to get readers engaged takes effort. But are the efforts paying off?

I had to read around a bit. It looks like a good place to start for this topic is "How to measure your nonprofit’s social media success" on Socialbrite. This article says that to measure effectiveness of social media efforts for any organization, we have to go back to the organization's mission. Just like we learned in LIBR 204, start with the mission, plan out the strategic objectives and strategic goals for each objective. The article tells readers to ask ourselves: "Have I clearly formulated a set of goals to advance my organization's strategic goals?" (para 4). Only when the goals have been clearly formulated, can we move onto formulating measurements.

For taking measurements, I liked the article titled "Five Simple Ways Nonprofits Can Measure Social Media ROI " because it doesn't just talk about the tools or the numbers. I thought it was one of the articles that actually linked the missions of the organizations with what we can do on social media sites. For example, an obvious goal of marketing is to get donations. So social media tools should be used in our efforts to turn supporters of our organizations into donors. The article recommends a poll to ask donors "what communication tool inspired them most to donate" (para 10). Same thing with volunteers. The article tells readers to ask the audience of social media sites to volunteer for specific events. It tells us not to assume that people will volunteer by having a generic "volunteer" link. It says that we need to ask people to volunteer for specific events with good reasons why they should volunteer. Then, we should ask volunteers what motivated them to volunteer to see if anything on our social media sites inspired them to volunteer. Another method recommended in this article is to track how much traffic on library's Website came from social media sites. Most libraries' Web sites are online resources. Thus, a visit to the library's Web site that was initiated from a social media site is a clear indication of increased usage of library resources resulting from efforts put into social media.

Of course the volunteers and the donated money have to be put into proper use to meet the mission and the objectives of the organizations but I thought these two ways to measure the success of marketing efforts put into social media tools were great compared to just looking at whether the number of followers and subscribers went up. Of course those numbers are also important and it is important to see which or your Tweets are being Retweeted and which blog postings are being recommended as suggested by Beth Kanter in her article titled "Using Metrics To Harvest Insights About Your Social Media Strategy" but if the library is in the online "conversation" but the coversation is not resulting in more support (both monetary and in volunteer hours) and more usage (both virtual and physical) then the social media efforts don't seem to have hit "success level" yet.