Marketers must do more than track Twitter followers and Facebook fans to achieve results from their social media marketing, said Carmen Sutter, senior director of data services at Warner Music Group, at the Adobe Omniture Summit 2011 on March 9.
Sutter and Adobe product manager Jeff Jordan used the “Social Media: Emerging Insights and Best Practices for Measurement” session to confront the question they said most marketers face: How is social media making money for companies?
“There are certain pieces of [social media] that you can measure and measure well,” said Sutter. “If you track back-links coming back to your site, you can accurately measure how many people saw your tweet or Facebook link, came over to your site and did something, and engaged with your content.”
However, at Warner Music Group, Sutter said she can’t ask artists to include a tracking code with their tweets, so she must look at the data generated by social media, such as the percentage of retweets per tweet, Facebook comments and keywords, to measure response. Sutter said such specific data “shows how many people are engaged with your social media channel.”
Jordan added that “the goal of analytics is to create actionable data.” He cited the TV show The Game, which The CW cancelled in 2009 but maintained such a strong social media audience that BET picked it up last year.
The show debuted strongly on BET after the cable network used Twitter and Facebook evangelists to spread the word about the show, he said.
