Best Practices for Driving Measurable Results via Social Marketing

By Angela B and Low

As the social marketing landscape continues to evolve, so do the methods in which brands calculate and quantify the results of their social marketing investments. Back in 2009, brands began their social media marketing initiatives with monitoring tools and by building profiles on Facebook and Twitter. In 2010, the focus shifted to driving engagement metrics, including "likes" and "followers."

Brands have made significant investments in building social marketing presences and amassing social followers, but the question still remains: What's the real value of these social marketing initiatives? As we move into the next phase of social media marketing, what's top of mind for every marketer is how to drive measurable results from their social marketing investments. Tapping into the power of consumer-to-consumer (C-to-C) dialogs across channels enables brands to drive quantifiable results via social referral programs.

Social referral programs, by nature, tap into consumers’ need to share information and content with their peers, resulting in C-to-C conversations. If brands can properly harness the power of these C-to-C dialogs, they can identify highly engaged, loyal advocates and turn them into social advocates who, in turn, refer the brands and the products and/or services they sell to their friends across their social graphs. Social referral programs foster the creation and sharing of consumer-generated content by incentivizing social advocates to refer their friends.

Successfully executed social referral programs drive measurable social marketing results for brands and create a high-value marketing channel. Here are some best practices when creating your social referral program:

Make referring easy. Providing the right sharing tools to make it easy for your customer advocates to share their passions about your brand with friends and social communities is one of the most critical elements of any social referral program. Advocates can share social referral programs with their friends in a number of ways, including email, personal URL (PURL), Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc.
Promote across channels. The more customers who see a social referral program the more likely those customers will become advocates and share the program with their friends. Use your available owned assets to promote your programs, including corporate website, email lists, social networks (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) and key customer touchpoints throughout the customer experience.
Increase participation with incentives. The offer or reason to share is the fundamental driving force behind a social referral program. Effective programs provide customer advocates with a compelling reason to share the program with their friends and incentivize those friends to engage with your brand as well. Offering incentives can dramatically amplify participation.
Make it personal. A simple and personalized friend experience fosters a high level of trust in the referral experience, which leads to engagement and participation. One of the most effective ways to create a personalized experience is via a friend landing page. A friend landing page is the page that a friend sees upon clicking on a trusted recommendation from your customer advocate. That landing page should communicate what the program is about and the offer, as well as include a call to action for conversion.
Add recognition and gamification. Tap into human desires and behavior to compete, excel and be recognized for achievement. Add in leaderboards and scoring to your referral program to foster participation and additional sharing.

Armed with these best practices for social referral programs, marketers can map their goals and objectives to their results. The measures of an effective social referral program are participation, amplification, friend clicks, referral traffic, clickthrough rate and conversion rate. The ability to track and measure across these dimensions and channels enables brands to optimize their program for ongoing success.

Below are the metrics that should be tracked on every social referral program:

Number of advocates: Program participation is measured by the number of customer advocates sharing the program. The number of advocates will vary based on the size of a brand's existing customer base.
Shares per advocate: Program amplification is measured by the number of times each advocate shares.
Number of social shares: Program reach is measured by the total number of social shares. Social shares can come in the form of email, sharing a PURL, tweet, Facebook post, Google+ post, etc.
Number of friend clicks: Friend clicks reflect the volume of new referral traffic driven by a social referral program.
Clicks per share: The clickthrough rate of a social referral program is measured by the number of friend clicks per social share, which vary based on the sharing channel.
Number of conversions: Conversions are the number of new friend sales, opt-ins or redemptions resulting from your social referral program.
Friend conversion rate: The friend conversion rate reflects the number of sales per friend clicks and varies based on the sharing channel.

Every brand should be thinking about a strategy to harness the power of their social advocates. The goal is to get your customers to market on your behalf. By implementing the best practices listed above, marketers can drive measurable social results in the areas of participation and amplification, friend clicks and referral traffic, clickthrough and conversion rate, and even improved search engine rankings.

Angela Bandlow is the vice president of marketing at Extole. Angela can be reached on Twitter @angelabandlow.