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If you are using social media for business or promotional purposes, then you should know how to measure it. However, when getting on to measure social media, it is not just for the sake of having some metrics, but to measure the effectiveness of the social media campaigns and further streamline it for better results. With proper analytics, you will be able to understand what was successful, what wasn’t, what your target audience expects, and how you can improve.

Two types of measurements

We may find that there are two major social media measurements to consider as:

• Ongoing analytics – Tracking activities over time and monitoring performance.
• Campaign-centric analytics – Getting analytics related to each event or campaign to assess its success.

Ongoing analytics will help to track the pulse of your social media communications regarding your business and brand in general. Once you set up the elements of brand tracking, you may just let is run by default and frequently fetch the data to see how it is going.

On the other hand, the campaign-specific metrics will help to understand the actual impact of your targeted content, which may be different from campaign to campaign. An ideal social media analytics program will take both of these measurements in a fine balance.

Monitoring social media analytics

Monitoring your social media analytics may surely distinguish between success and failure of your social media activities. In this excerpt, we are trying to outline what all things you need to monitor on social media and what tools to be used to do proper analysis and reporting or social media campaigns.

Social media analytics compass

It is almost impossible to monitor and measure everything related to social media on every channel at a time. So, we need to determine what is essential for your business and how to do monitoring of it well. For a better understanding of beginners, we will discuss the most critical generic areas of the so-called social media compass, i.e., the most important analytical measures.

1. Size of the target audience

Many are confused about the matter whether the size of your audience really matters? Of course, it does matter if you are trying to promote a brand or service and building a relevant audience. It is essential to continuously build a relevant audience if you want to take your message to the right people on time.

Your audience will grow gradually through organic methods as well as on investing in paid ads or so. In fact, there is nothing wrong if you plan to invest in audience building tactics if you have a scope of converting the audience into business overtime. You should compare your rate of audience growth over a week or month with that of your competitors. Along with building the audience rate, also keep track of the unfollowers too on the go.

2. Audience profile

As you slowly grow your audience, it is also essential to ensure that you are building the right type of audience, especially when you are paying for it, deciding whether you are making a worthy investment. Say, for example, if you try to build it through Twitter, this platform will allow you to access reports stating what types of profiles like marketers, entrepreneurs, or musicians, etc. are a part of your audience group.

You can do the same on Facebook also by setting up an ad which is targeted to a specific category of your Facebook target audience. This is also possible on Instagram to get some real Instagram likes. Say, for example; you can do this filtering for a specific interest of people, and see how many of your followers fall in that category to plan relevant campaigns for them. With a smart approach to it, you may perform this profile analysis across all social media platforms. You may use a traditional approach like surveys to most advanced premium tools offered by social media platforms to accomplish this.

3. Reach and engagement

The campaigners also should monitor the social reach of your content and also see how much actually pay keen attention to it, even if not responding. Lack of responses doesn’t necessarily be non-interest. Engagement is another key aspect of monitoring as some of them with keen interest may engage with your content. If you find no engagement at all, then it may be either be the wrong content or the wrong audience you hit. You may typically split your audience under the following categories.

• Lurkers – those who simply watch your content, but not interacting.
• Influencers – They are connected to a large audience and can make an influence among them.
• Engagers – People who are largely active in your target community and people will start recognizing their names.

4. Traffic

The primary objective of your social media campaigns is to bring traffic back to your website or product pages. For some promoters, traffic is just enough. Say for example, for a site; they get paid for ads based on the volume of traffic. For the rest, the traffic needs to be converted into sales to meet their objective.

5. Content analysis

As we have seen, creating content and sharing it through social media is an expensive and work-intensive affair. So, on a regular basis, you need to do content analysis as well to see if your efforts are getting recognized or not. You have to check whether:

• Whether your images, videos, and text updates work the best?
• Whether the content you share is in fine balance with the right mix or too much focused-on promotion?
• Do you have enough engagement on the questions?
• What changes are there on the social media platforms and what changes it demands from you?

6. Sentiment analysis

The sentimental analysis covers the negative, positive, or neutral mentions on your brand. The latest social media tools are more focused on measuring the sentiments of the target audience over your brand through their social mentions about you. Even though these tools are not 100% accurate, it can surely be a good indicator of where you go wrong and what to correct.

These are some functional pointers included in social media analytics, which is a far wider specialty. However, it could be a good starting point if you master over these to streamline your social media campaigns to meet your online objectives.

Source: Social Media Analytics – What to Measure for Success? by thomassujain

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Inside CXM, a new online global thought leadership hub for customer experience management (CXM/CEM) professionals, officially launched yesterday. Inside CXM is focused on bringing you the latest insights from the field of customer experience management. According to Inside CXM, their goal with this program is to provide valuable content via experts who have their finger on the pulse of the global customer experience marketplace.

I am happy to announce my partnership (disclosure – I am a paid contributor) with Inside CXM by providing unique content to their site. I join a host of other industry experts who cover topics like aligning your organization to deliver a unified experience, creating contextual customer journeys and using customer insights to build a smarter experience. These experts include Flavio Martins, Andy Reid and Molly Boyer. Check out the other contributors.

My first article for Inside CXM, “Why Customer Experience Management? To Leave the World a Better Place,” focuses on how businesses need to consider that the impact they have on customers goes well beyond their company walls and financial ledger. Business leaders need to remember that customers’ interactions with their company not only impact how the customers feel about the company, but the quality of those interactions can impact, positively or negatively, their personal lives. Customer experiences are, after all, a subset of all of life’s experiences.

Originally Posted at: Inside CXM: New Global Thought Leader Hub for Customer Experience Professionals by bobehayes

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Customers can exhibit many different types of loyalty behaviors toward a company (e.g., recommend, purchase same, purchase different products, stay/leave), each responsible for different types of business growth. Furthermore, when asked about their loyalty behaviors via relationship surveys, customers’ ratings of loyalty questions show that customer loyalty essentially boils down to three different types of customer loyalty:

• Retention Loyalty: Degree to which customers will remain as customers or not leave to competitors. This type of loyalty impacts overall customer growth.
• Advocacy Loyalty: Degree to which customers feel positively toward/will advocate your product/service/brand. This type of loyalty impacts new customer growth.
• Purchasing Loyalty: Degree to which customers will increase their purchasing behavior. This type of loyalty impacts average revenue per customer.

These three distinct types of customer loyalty form the foundation of the RAPID loyalty approach. Using the RAPID loyalty’s multi-faceted approach helps companies understand how improving the customer experience can improve business growth in different ways. If interested, you can read my recent article on the development of the RAPID loyalty approach.

Product and Service Experience

Customer experience management (CEM) is the process of understanding and managing customers’ interactions with and perceptions about your company/brand. The ultimate goal of this process is to improve the customer experience and, consequently, increase customer loyalty. Two primary customer experience areas that are commonly assessed are the customers’ perception of their 1) product experience and 2) service experience. These two areas are shown to be among the top drivers of customer loyalty; customers who have a good experience in these two areas report higher levels of customer loyalty than customers who have a poor experience.

How does Product and Service Experience Impact Each Type of Customer Loyalty?

To understand the impact of the product and service experience on different facets of customer loyalty, I used existing survey data. Last year, Mob4Hire, a global crowd-sourced testing and market research community, and I conducted a worldwide survey, asking respondents’ about their experience with and loyalty towards their current wireless service provider. To measure the product and service experiences, respondents were asked to indicate their agreement about statements that describes their provider (1 to 5 – higher scores indicate agreement and better customer experience). As a measure of the product experience, we averaged respondent’s ratings across two questions: 1) good coverage in my area and 2) reliable service (few dropped calls). As a measure of the service experience, we averaged respondent’s ratings about their provider’s representatives across 5 areas: 1) responds to needs, 2) has knowledge to answer questions, 3) was courteous, 4) understands my needs and 5) always there when I need them. The survey also asked about the respondents’ loyalty toward their wireless service provider across the three types of loyalty: 1) retention, 2) advocacy and 3) purchasing.

To index the degree of impact that each customer experience dimension has on customer loyalty, I simply correlated the ratings of each customer experience dimension (Coverage/Reliability; Customer Service) with each of the three loyalty measures (Retention, Advocacy, Purchasing). I did this analysis for the entire dataset and then for each of the wireless service providers who had more than 100 respondents. Figure 1 contains the results for the impact of Coverage/Reliability on customer loyalty.

As you can see in Figure 1, using the entire sample (far left bars), the product experience has the largest impact on advocacy loyalty (r = .49), followed by purchasing (r = .31) and retention loyalty (r = .34). Similarly, in Figure 2, using the entire sample (far left bars), the service experience has the largest impact on advocacy loyalty (r = .48), followed by purchasing (r = .34) and retention loyalty (r = .32). Generally speaking, while improving the product and service experience will have the greatest impact on advocacy loyalty, improvement in these areas will have an impact, albeit a smaller one, on purchasing and retention loyalty. I find this pattern of results in other industries as well.

Looking at individual wireless service providers in Figures 1 and 2, however, we see exceptions to this rule (Providers were ordered by their Advocacy Loyalty scores.). For example, we see that improving the product experience will have a comparable impact on different types of loyalty for specific companies (Figure 1 – T-Mobile, Safaricom). Additionally, we see that improving the service experience will have a comparable impact on different types of loyalty for specific companies (Figure 2 – Safaricom, MTN, Orange, Warid Telecom, Telenor, and Ufone). The value of improving the service experience is different across companies depending on the types of customer loyalty it impacts. For example, improving the service experience is much more valuable for Safaricom than it is for T-Mobile. Improving the service experience will greatly impact all three types of customer loyalty for Safaricom and only one for T-Mobile.  I suspect the reasons for variability across providers in what drives their customer loyalty could be due to company maturity, the experience delivery process, market pressures and customer type. Deeper analyses (e.g., stepwise regression, path analysis) of these data for specific providers could help shed light on the reasons.

Benefits of Measuring Different Types of Customer Loyalty

Improving the customer experience impacts different types of customer loyalty and this pattern varies across specific companies. For some companies, improving the customer experience will primarily drive new customer growth (advocacy loyalty). For other companies, improving the customer experience will also significantly drive existing customer growth (retention and purchasing loyalty).

Companies who measure and understand different types of customer loyalty and how they are impacted by the customer experience have an advantage over companies who measure only one type of loyalty (typically advocacy):

• Companies can target solutions to optimize different types of customer loyalty to improve business growth. For example, including retention loyalty questions (e.g., “likelihood to quit”) and a purchasing loyalty questions (e.g., “likelihood to buy different”) can help companies understand why customers are leaving and identify ways to increase customers’ purchasing behavior, respectively.
• Key performance indicators (KPIs) can be identified for each type of customer loyalty. Identification of different KPIs (key drivers of customer loyalty) helps companies ensure they are monitoring all important customer experience areas. Identifying and monitoring all KPIs helps ensure the entire company is focused on matters that are important to the customer and his/her loyalty.
• Companies are better equipped to quantify the value of their CEM program and obtain more accurate estimates of the Return on Investment (ROI) of the program. The ROI of a specific improvement opportunity will depend on how the company measures customer loyalty. If only advocacy loyalty is measured, the estimate of ROI is based on new customer growth. When companies measure advocacy, purchasing and retention loyalty, the estimate of ROI is based on new and existing customer growth.

Final Thoughts

The primary goal of CEM is to improve customer loyalty. Companies that narrowly define customer loyalty are missing out on opportunities to fully understand the impact that their CEM program has on the company’s bottom line. Companies need to ensure they are comprehensively measuring all facets of customer loyalty. A poor customer loyalty measurement approach can lead to sub-optimal business decisions, missed opportunities for business growth and an incomplete picture of the health of the customer relationship.

Originally Posted at: Measuring Customer Loyalty is Essential for a Successful CEM Program