Social media marketing uses social media sites to positively influence consumers toward an organization. While social media offers opportunities, some myths exist, including that it is just a fad, for young people only, or provides no return. Effective social media marketing requires understanding target audiences, goals, platforms, content strategy, and metrics. Measuring includes quantitative metrics like engagement and qualitative measures of sentiment. Tools can track key performance indicators to evaluate success.

1. PA 685: Strategic Management of
Public Communications
Module 6:
New Media Communication

2. Popular Social Media Sites, as of March, 2014

3. What Is Social Media Marketing?
Social media marketing (SMM) uses social
media portals to positively influence consumers
toward a website, company, brand, product,
service, or a person.
Typically, the end goal of social media marketing
is a “conversion,” such as the purchase of a
product, use of a service, subscription to a
newsletter, registration in an online community,
or some other desirable action in the eyes of the
agency.

4. 7 Myths of Social Media Marketing
1.
2.
3.
4.
Social
Social
There
Social
Media is Just a Fad
Media is Just for the Young
is No Return in Social Media Marketing
Media Marketing isn’t Right for
Government Agencies / Public Sector
5.
6.
Social Media
Social Media
Consuming
Social Media
Marketing is New
Marketing is Too Time-
7. is Free

5. Myth #1: Social Media is Just a Fad
Instead, social media is:
Founded in community, socialization, and
word-of-mouth marketing
Based on a stable premise that people are
social and want to connect with other people
Related to technological evolution that
continues to provide new and attractive means
for people to interact
Rooted in core trends and behaviors in social
media interaction that remain stable over time

6. Social Media Usage Outpaces
Traditional Media

7. Myth #2: Social Media is Just for
the Young
Instead, the reality is:
Older users are among the fastest growing
demographics on most social media sites
• YouTube - 18 to 55, evenly divided between
males and females
Facebook - 61% of those 35 to 54 and 48% of
people over 55 have Facebook pages
•
Users span all age and income brackets
Social networks are increasingly being adopted
by older populations

8. Myth #3: There Is No Return In
Social Media Marketing
Instead, social media returns are:
Difficult to measure, and many organizations
do not currently measure their social media
efforts
Measured in a variety of different ways such
as:
Savings in customer service
Online word-of-mouth promotion (buzz)
Improved brand awareness and reputation
Increased brand loyalty

9. Myth #4: Social Media Marketing
Isn’t Right For The Public Sector
Instead, social media marketing:
Is just as relevant to the day-to-day activities
of government agencies and public-serving
organizations
Has a powerful ability to drive word-of-mouth
or recommendations from friends
Influences search as a resource because search
results frequently include social media sites
 Even if organizations don’t believe in the value of engaging in
social conversations as a part of marketing, there is no denying
the value of a strong agency or product presence in search
results.

10. Myth #5: Social Media Marketing
is New
Instead, what’s new is:
Technology and media are changing the role
social, behavioral, and economic concepts play
in modern marketing efforts
Conversations are now public, online, and
viewable for the indefinite future
 Consumers are already on social sites, talking about
organizations on their Facebook pages, blogs, and
Twitter accounts
 Whether an agency choose to acknowledge this or not
is done at its own risk.

11. Myth #6: Social Media is Too
Time-Consuming
Three key ways to limit the time investment in
social media marketing:
1. Look for underutilized employees who can
spend some of their time on social media
marketing
2.Leverage efficiency tools too streamline social
media efforts
3.Use mobile devices to boost efficiency—don’t
tie employees to a desktop computer for
official agency messaging over social media
outlets.

12. Myth #7: Social Media Is Free
While most sites do not have a fee for usage,
costs include:
Time and resources
Fees for producing and creating content
Fees for consultants or agencies involved in
building strategy

13. Why Social Media Marketing is
Different
Traditional Approach Social Media Approach
• Controls content seen
by audience
One-way
communication
• Emphasizes audience
contribution
Two-way
communication
Discussion approach
Trust building
• •
•
•
Domineering approach•
Exclusivity
agreements
•

14. What are the Characteristics of a
Successful Social Media Marketer?
Technical Skills Personal Attributes
• Basic computer skills Personable
Good listening skills
Diverse vocabulary
Strong reading and
comprehension skills
Creativity and passion
Professionalism in
response to negative
comments
Proficiency with
search engines
Proficiency with
navigating the web
Knowledge of coding or
graphic design helpful
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

15. Careers in Social Media Marketing
 Spending on social media is forecast to
expand substantially between 2014 and 2020
Demand for social media marketers is
increasing as we focus more on the strategy
behind social media and devise measurement
approaches
The majority of the jobs in social media are
freelance rather than full-time
The first step toward landing a social media
job is getting involved
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16. Spending on Social Media Marketing

17. Confidence in Social Media
Marketing Effectiveness
2014 Content Marketing Trends in North America—Study conducted by Content Marketing Institute

18. Incorporating Social Media Into
Your Marketing Strategy
Are You Ready for Social Media?
Are your targeted stakeholders likely to be online?
Are you ready to handle negativity?
How will you incorporate this into people’s daily jobs?
How will you measure the results?
How long are you willing to give it a try?
What’s your willingness to experiment, take risks and
adjust your plans?

19. Incorporating Social Media Into
Your Marketing Strategy
Parts of a Social Media Strategy
Identify your goals
Identify your target audience
Create a profile or brand
Find the social media that’s right for you
Plan a time frame
Include Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Measure progress toward goals

20. Incorporating Social Media Into
Your Marketing Strategy
Parts of a Social Media Strategy

21. Incorporating Social Media Into
Your Marketing Strategy
Parts of a Social Media Strategy
Identify Your Target Market
Who are your stakeholders?
What characteristics do they have?
What age group do they come from?
What are their online habits (e.g., completing
forms, chatting, blogging)?
Are they likely to engage with organizations online?
What social media platforms are they using?

22. Incorporating Social Media Into
Your Marketing Strategy
Parts of a Social Media Strategy
Create a Profile or Brand
As you create your online profiles, think about your
screen name and organization’s name and reinforce
branding and name recognition!
Website Domain Name – http://www.nasa.gov
Twitter – http://twitter.com/nasa
Facebook – http://facebook.com/NASA
Instagram – http://instagram.com/NASA
YouTube – http://youtube.com/NASA

23. Incorporating Social Media Into
Your Marketing Strategy
Parts of a Social Media Strategy
Decide on appropriate social media
applications
Which ones are your stakeholders using?
Start with one - Understand it, utilize it effectively
and then expand your online presence
Write good and appropriate content
Build relationships; listen and engage
with your followers

24. Incorporating Social Media Into
Your Marketing Strategy
Parts of a Social Media Strategy
 Plan the time frame
Map out a schedule for updating content
Blog posts/Podcasts on Mondays
Posts on Twitter and Facebook at strategic times of day
Consider timezones—When people are getting to the
office on the West Coast (8-9am), East coast lunches
are starting. Post content when people are likely to
see it—don’t make them scroll to find information!
This should be accomplished on a regular basis
Follow the schedule

25. Incorporating Social Media Into
Your Marketing Strategy
Parts of a Social Media Strategy
Develop a content strategy plan
Content should be both useful and usable by
stakeholders
Develop a plan for creating this type of content by
reviewing the full offerings of your agency
Develop a plan for getting the content published
Not as easy as it sounds—who will write, respond?
Publishing or uploading content takes a dedicate
effort on your part

26. Incorporating Social Media Into
Your Marketing Strategy
Parts of a Social Media Strategy
Measure progress toward goals
Did we learn something about our stakeholders
that we didn’t know before?
Did our stakeholders learn something about us?
Were we able to engage our stakeholders in new
conversations?
Were we able to resolve old conversations/issues
that continue to be brought up by stakeholders?

27. Incorporating Social Media Into
Your Marketing Strategy
Parts of a Social Media Strategy
Social networks
Blogs
Microblogging
Wikis
Podcasts
Forums
Online Communities
Multimedia sharing
Social bookmarking
RSS readers
GEO tracking
Recommendations
and reviews
Your social media options are endless and expanding each day, but
where are YOUR stakeholders?

28. Incorporating Social Media Into
Your Marketing Strategy
The conversations are already happening.
Are you ready?
Are you willing to listen?
How will you measure them, your responses,
and your effectiveness?

29. A Brief History of Social Media Metrics
For current purposes social media monitoring is
defined as the process of tracking, measuring, and
evaluating an organization’s social media marketing
initiatives.
The earliest adopters (marketing and public relations
firms) used social media monitoring to detect negative
comments posted to the social web about their clients.
As the social web rapidly grew, the importance of
monitoring and measuring responses also increased.
Eventually, social media monitoring evolved beyond
basic listening into active interaction and measurement.

30. Social Media Measurement
 Measurement professionals were unable to even agree
on definitions, let alone how to measure the key
elements of social media marketing.
Less than one out of seven companies measured their
return on investment for social media marketing during
the first two years of implementation.
Measurement is needed because it enables marketers to
assess progress toward achieving marketing goals,
determine how strategies are performing, and make
necessary adjustments.
Social media measurement is the determination of the
volume of content and the sentiment toward a brand
or topic on the social web.
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31. How To Measure Social Media
 The first step is defining an organization’s
qualitative and quantitative social media goals.
The second step is to choose key performance
indicators (KPIs) that will accurately measure
progress toward those goals.
The third step is to set a baseline or benchmarks,
which will act as standards against which all social
media KPIs are measured.
The final step is to compare an organization’s social
media KPIs to its benchmarks over a period of
time.
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32. Quantitative Social Media Measuring
 Quantitative social media measuring is a
methodology that focuses on counting the volume of
specific types of content on the social web.
To make quantitative social media metrics useful,
these metrics must be tied to specific marketing goals.
In addition, goals and related KPIs must be
established for each type of social media platform in
order to maximize results.
These measures have begun to shift beyond the
number of likes, fans/followers, shares/retweets to
focusing on conversations generated and actions
prompted that tie into marketing efforts.
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33. Qualitative Social Media Measuring
 Qualitative social media measuring is the process of
accessing the opinions and beliefs about an agency,
program, service, or product.
Qualitative metrics play a key role in identifying
stakeholder satisfaction and dissatisfaction with the
agency, program, service, or product.
Qualitative measures assess the tenor and emotional
expressions about the agency.
Quantitative and qualitative measurements are not
mutually exclusive - combining the two types of social
media metrics provides a more realistic and accurate
picture of an organization’s progress in achieving its
desired marketing goals
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34. Social Marketing Analytics Business Objectives, Key
Performance Indicators, and Vendors to Watch

35. KPIs for Measuring Dialog
 Share of Voice indicates how an agency stacks
up in comparison with its competitors.
 Audience Engagement shows the level of a
company’s engagement in comparison to its
viewership on the social media platform.
 Conversation Reach reveals the number of
unique visitors who participate in a specific
brand/issue/topic conversation across one or
more social media channels.

36. KPIs for Measuring Advocacy
 Active Advocates measures the number of
individuals generating positive sentiment
over a given time frame.
 Advocate Influence indicates the unique
advocate’s influence across one or more social
media channels.
 Advocacy Impact measures the direct or
indirect contributions of advocacy on
conversions.

37. KPIs for Measuring Stakeholder Support
 Resolution Rate is the percentage of stakeholder
inquiries resolved satisfactorily using social
media channels.
Resolution Time indicates the amount of time
required to produce a human-generated
response to stakeholder issues posed in social
media channels.
Satisfaction Score indicates the relative
satisfaction of stakeholders by dividing positive
stakeholder feedback by all stakeholder feedback.
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38. KPIs Measuring for Spurring Innovation
 Topic Trends measure key brand/product/
service topics identified by monitoring social
media conversations.
Sentiment Ratio indicates the positive,
neutral, and negative brand mentions about
specific products or services over a given time
period.
Idea Impact measures the rate of interaction,
engagement, and positive sentiment
generated from a new product or service idea.
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39. The Net Promoter Score (NPS)
 The NPS assumes that every company’s
stakeholders can be divided into three classes:
•
•
•
Promoters - loyal enthusiasts
Passives - satisfied but unenthusiastic customers
Detractors - unhappy customers
 The NPS is calculated by taking the percentage
of stakeholders who are Promoters and
subtracting the percentage who are Detractors
 An NPS that is above zero indicates a good
customer relation’s rating.

40. Return on Investment
 Return on Investment (ROI) is a ratio arrived at by
subtracting expenses from product/program/service
offerings and resources to carry them out and then
dividing the result by the expenses.
For social media marketing efforts, the argument is
made that impact should be the primary goal of social
media marketing—not ROI.
Building brand awareness, perception, and loyalty, as
well as improving stakeholder relationships have a
long-term effect in increased ROI, but they are very
difficult to measure in the short-term.
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41. Evaluation
 Just measuring the impact of social media activity is
insufficient—measurement only gains meaning
through analysis of trends over time and across
different stakeholder segments.
This analysis will help determine what is successful
for your agency and will drive future social media
efforts.
Sound analysis of social media measurements relies
on collection of the relevant data.
It takes a significant commitment of time and
resources by an organization to evaluate social media
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42. Selecting Social Media Monitoring Tools
 In March, 2014, there were more than 250 paid and free social
media monitoring tools available.
 Depending on the size of your public communications budget
and staff expertise, you may want to consider using an outsider
to help, whether this is a consultant or a vendor.
 The process of selecting one for an organization to use can be
aided by determining:
•
•
which metrics to measure and what platforms to cover
which price range an organization can afford
 Vendors continue to improve their offerings, and marketers
continue to rely on them to measure performance and justify
expenditures on social media marketing activities

43. Services, as of March 2014
Review of Seven Top Social Media

44. Services, as of March 2014
Review of Seven Top Social Media

45. Future of Social Media Measurement
 Without doubt the rapid pace of advances in social
media monitoring and measurement techniques,
metrics, and tools will continue into the foreseeable
future
As connections between people, posts, comments,
discussions, articles, and reviews expand exponentially,
these linkages capture untold information, which can be
mined for valuable marketing insights.
Improvements in natural language processing and the
“Semantic Web” promise to deliver even more powerful
ways to monitor the social web and help drive future
public communication efforts on social media
platforms.
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