Businesses’ priorities on the social Web are no longer limited to increasing likes or retweets, says Dave Evans, vice president of social strategy at Lithium (lithium.com), a global provider of software for building customer relationships through social media. Now, it’s about social customer experience, data and social initiatives that deliver measurable business results.
“Top brands have moved past social media marketing. They use social channels to engage with customers from pre-sales and initial support through to after-the-sale service,” Evans states in a blog post for B2BMarketing.com. How can businesses tap in to analytics and convert this new opportunity into measurable business value? Evans offers these insights:
Measure engagement — If your objectives are increased sales, then measuring the percentage of sales following engagement through social media is a success indicator. Or, if your objectives are related to service—for example, cost savings arising out of call deflection—then quantifying how quickly and accurately customers’ issues are being resolved is a key performance indicator.
Focus on brand advocates — Brand advocates are willing to put significant time and effort, and often their name into recommending, defending or inspiring a particular business.
Your engagement and analytics platform should harness this data and identify how fast your marketing, sales and customer service teams are responding to customer inquiries. You should be able to see the extent to which suggestions from customers are being reviewed and turned into real improvements, and the degree to which the original contributors are recognized for the value of their contributions.
Empower customers — Your owned social platform knits together vital channels in customer service: the metrics associated with these channels can then be drawn off and organized, to affirm ROI in the context of your business objectives.
The number of visitors from these networks who register, create content, offer kudos on others’ posts, etc., all matter as indicators of engagement.
“Your analytics platform is an integral part of your social customer experience management toolset. Grounded in your business objectives, proper analytics make it that much easier to know where your priorities are and what customers want from your business,” Evans states. “Taken together, that gives you a clear roadmap to business success.”
