Measuring Social Media What Marketers Need To Know

Hey, before we get to today’s show, I want to tell you something we just released. It’s our 18th annual Social Media Marketing Industry Report, and it’s out now. Here’s something that jumped out at me as I was preparing this report. Two-thirds of marketers say the pace of change is overwhelming.

If that’s you, you are not alone, and I want to help. Download this free report. It covers everything from platform shifts to AI adoption to the growing divide between B2B and B2C marketers, and you can get it for free right now by visiting socialmediaexaminer.com slash report 26. Socialmediaexaminer.com slash report 26.

Welcome to the Social Media Marketing Podcast, helping you navigate the social media jungle. And now, here’s your host, Michael Stelzner. Hello, Thank you so much for joining me. Welcome to the Social Media Marketing Podcast, brought to you by socialmediaexaminer.com.

I’m your host, Michael Stelzner, and this is the podcast for marketers and business owners who want to know what works with social media. I’m super excited about today’s show. I’m going to be joined by Lutz Finger. He’s the co-author of Ask, Measure, Learn, and we’re going to explore how to measure social media.

And who doesn’t want to know, how to measure, because it’s one of those hot topics that everybody seems to struggle with. I’ve also got a cool discovery that I want to share with you right now. Do you use Google Analytics? I hope you do, to track traffic to your website or your blog or whatever you’ve got going on.

The tip that I’m going to share with you is, frankly, a tip more than a discovery. Have you ever wondered how to determine whether your social activities are making an impact on whatever it is that you’re trying to sell? For example, we’re selling Social Media Success Summit, and we’re doing different activities across Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn and the other social networks. And the real question is, what kind of traffic is that driving to the particular sales page?

I’m going to tell you how to do this in seconds. It’s really cool. What you do is you log into Google Analytics, and then you go down along the left, and you’ll see a bunch of things like audience, acquisition, and then behavior. Behavior is its own category, and unfortunately, there’s one under audience called behavior.

But you want to go to the one that’s on the left called behavior, and it has a bunch of little rectangles next to it. You open up that tab, scroll down to site content, and then scroll down to all pages. Once you do that, you can see all the most popular pages on your website, and you can go ahead. There’s a search bar, and it says, advanced.

And you can type in the actual URL of the URL in question, and it’ll come right up. Or maybe you’ll see all the URLs listed on the page, and you just click on the URL in question. Then what you do is you can go up to the very top of the page, and you can select the date range that you want to look at. For example, you can look at today, you can look at the last month.

And in this particular situation, I’m looking at the last month. And what I want to do is not just see the total page views, I want to know how many page views are coming from the actual social networks. So what you can do is if you scroll just, if you go just below the graph that shows you the traffic, there’s this thing that says primary dimension, and then secondary dimension. And secondary dimension is a button, you click on it, and you’ll see a dropdown of all sorts of different variables, acquisition, advertising, behavior.

One of them is called social. And what you want to do is you want to go to the social, and you want to go to the primary dimension. Open the social one and choose social network. What will happen is that we’ll think for a few seconds, and bada-bing, it’ll show you for the particular page in question, how much traffic has come in from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest, and whatever other social networks are bringing in traffic.

And it aggregates all the mobile and desktop into one thing. Now, there’s another way you can do this, you can go under acquisition under secondary dimension and choose source, but then you’re going to see, all the different sources. Like for example, you might see mobile Facebook and regular Facebook. And if you just want a high level aggregation, this will tell you.

And what’s really cool is it’ll tell you different kinds of behavior. For example, interestingly enough, someone who comes in from Twitter is only spending 43 seconds on the page, but someone coming from Facebook is spending a minute and 16 seconds. So that’s quite intriguing. It shows us that the traffic we’re bringing from Facebook tends to hang around on the site and on that particular page a little bit longer.

So hopefully this is a little ninja trick that you may or may not known about, and it allows you to get really cool insight immediately. Another way you can use this is if you’ve got a really popular blog post on your website and you can’t seem to figure out where all that traffic is coming from, you can go ahead and use this secondary dimension metric and you’ll see there’s a bazillion different variables that you can do underneath there. And it’s really, really cool. With that, let’s transition to today’s episode.

Expert interview. Helping you simplify your social safari. Here’s this week’s expert guide. I’m very excited to be joined today by Lutz Finger.

If you don’t know who Lutz is, he’s the director of data analytics at LinkedIn, and he co-authored an awesome new book called Ask, Measure, Learn, using social media analytics to understand and influence customer behavior. Lutz, welcome to the show. Hey there. Hey, so today, what we’re going to do is we’re going to be talking about how to use social media analytics and what we’re going to do is we’re going to explore how to measure social media activities.

So Lutz, why don’t you share a bit about why you are so interested in social media analytics and maybe a little bit of your background? Thanks. Yeah. So social media analytics is actually amazing because we suddenly get data from people’s behavior and it’s, it is a brand new area.

So far, we measured a lot of things and trying to predict stuff from it. And that’s what people do. People want to do. They always want to predict.

Now with social media, we actually are able to see human behavior. I’ve seen behavior which helps us to predict certain things. So if you are a company, if you’re a brand, if you’re a small business owner, you want to know what are your clients thinking. You want to know where to find clients and all of those things.

And social media actually gives us a very good way into that field. And with good metrics, we probably have hopefully good results. Clients, better branding and so on and so forth. Before social media, how did we go about getting this information in your opinion?

Well, a lot of by trial and error. Now, one of the misunderstanding of social media analytics is that that changes hugely. It does change if you apply metrics correctly. But it’s, um, social was a huge hype because of that, because of this ability to measure things, we haven’t measured before.

And everybody get excited because they believe, you know, like marketeer said, Oh, we have such a hard time to describe our value or salespeople said like, Oh, I have such a hard time finding new clients and so on and so forth. Now, social media came around and there are new metrics and some, this is a big underlying, some of them are actually helpful for certain things. Other aren’t. Now, um, if you, um, so what you see today is that at some parts we can go away from this trial and error and other areas we still stuck with it.

Interesting. So what I hear you saying Lutz is that the promise of social media analytics, um, has a lot of hype around it. So what are some of the things that perhaps are misconceptions about what we can do with social media analytics? Um, I, before I joined LinkedIn, I actually built up my own company called Fischer & Analytics.

I sold this last year to WPP and, um, this company was mainly about figuring out mainly for governments and NGOs, um, what, what social media means for to them and helping them finding those nuggets where they kind of actually have a metric. The problem is it used to be, it used to be that data was something or measurements were something for the specialist. You needed a big tooling. You needed to like a big, a big database.

And with that big database, big investment came and kind of people who, who worked on it and no business person would say, Oh, I can do this by myself. Now with social media, suddenly you have all those tooling from trending content, follow our analytics and so on and so forth. And you get a cloud score here, right and left. And you see, wow, I actually have a score.

I have actually a measurement. So let me decide something on top of this measurement, which if you haven’t planned it out correctly, you’re going to have a score. And you’re going to have a measurement. If you haven’t thought about what you actually want to achieve, most of the time leads into like some negative kind of that, that doesn’t help.

Or if you say it in the Gardner curve, you know, like social media went through the hype and it’s not like when our social media measurement went through a hype, suddenly you have thousands and one tools. And my old company was one of them to measure. And then it goes through the valley of depression because if people haven’t had formulated their business goal, then any measurement won’t work. Very intriguing.

So this is a great transition. I mean, a lot of businesses today are struggling measuring social media activity. What, why do you think that is? Why are we, why are so many of us today, despite all the tools that you alluded to, struggling to measure social media?

Because, so you suddenly have a measurement. So like, let’s say you find a metric which is called influencer. Okay. And then you say, wow, okay, I need an influencer to bring my brand up front.

If you don’t understand how this metric was built, because there isn’t a natural influencer metrics, you probably won’t find stuff to bring your brand on. It already starts by the different channels. Being an influencer very often means only being somebody who has a reach. So the whole marketing area is a very different area.

And I think that’s a very important part of the whole marketing area. tries to hunt this kind of the influencer down since 1951. That was the first time that people talked about an influencer concept was actually Katz and Lazar, who kind of came up with this. And it, since 1951, this idea has kept on going.

But it was a rather theoretical one. Now, suddenly with social media, there are, at least I know about 10 different metrics, it might be even more out there. And people say, okay, now I have my influencer, and I’m going to start doing this. And then they start putting money behind it.

And then they realize, hold on, it’s actually not doing what it needed me to do. So that’s pretty much a big problem for social media metrics. You start with the measurement, and then you think about what should I do with it? While the correct way would be the opposite, start with a question, and then come with a measure.

Can you give me an example? Sure. So if you, let’s stick to the influencer. So more or less research has shown the influencer, as we have envisioned them, this person who influences everybody doesn’t exist.

Now, you will say, hold on, the social examiner is definitely something which people listen to and look for it. And that’s correct. People get influenced by this one, but not in the traditional sense of they didn’t have an idea before. And now you change their mind.

No, people come to your site because you are the, like one of the big people, like one of the sites which really knows something about it. So they come there and look for tools. They look for insights. So you create reach.

Reach is the one. Now, if I want to influence or create reach, or if I want to reach a certain audience, then I should go to your site. Then I should talk to you. So I need to do my normal audience analytics before I actually go out.

So, question is, who do I want to reach? Well, I want to reach people who work with social media. Okay. How do I then, okay, like my question is now clear.

I want to reach and show my new tool set or whatsoever to people who work with social media. Well, there are a couple of people in this field who have really good ability to reach those. Social examiner is one of them. You might, one of them, your conference is one of them.

So I go to you and saying, okay, please, help me reaching those people. And then I measure, obviously, whether I have reached my people. Well, if I reached my audience, if I want to do something completely different, I want to sell clothing. Yes, you’re an influencer, but you’re an influencer in the wrong content area.

And if I want to do clothing, there’s actually another thing which we need to look for. Clothing trends are very local, meaning influence is actually very local. So me going to the one person who is influential, I’m going to go to that person. And then I’m going to clothing in the United States would probably fall short.

So today, we know, influence is based on three things. It’s based on who creates reach, are people, like, who is ready, what is the audience who is ready to buy, and what’s your audience who is, like, taking this kind of content in? Because reach by itself creates only awareness. And as we all know, awareness is not going to be not really intention.

So that’s kind of those three metrics you need to follow. Can you summarize those three metrics one more time real quickly? Absolutely. Influence is based on three metrics.

Reach, meaning if I don’t reach anybody, I have no ability to influence them. However, only reach by itself, and that’s the biggest shortcoming of many social media metrics, only reach by itself does not do it. However, reach is one metric. Second metric is content, to understand the content dependency, what actually it is, what we see out there.

And it’s a funny by-remark or anecdote that you saw everybody talked about influencing, and today a lot of people do not talk about influencing, but today they talk about content marketing. Because they realized reach is not the only thing. Actually, content, the content dependency is the second thing. And the third one is actually a readiness.

The readiness, like any online retailer actually will nod their head and say, yes, sure, I know. Like Christmas trees happen to sell better in December than in January. There needs to be somehow a readiness. But that is actually valid as well for anything we do.

So if we market, if we’re trying to find salespeople, if we push out a brand, if we push out a story, if we push out a branding, then a readiness is as well needed. A readiness to believe. And that’s like from readiness to believe, we could go on into contagiousness and virality and so on and so forth, because that is the biggest part there. Let’s go ahead and talk about those two.

Okay. If you type in today a Google search, how to get my brand viral or how to get my story viral, you will find a lot of people telling you that this is possible to do. And I actually, I think first of all, the terminology viral is wrong. It’s contagious.

What’s the difference? Virality is something which is equally infectious at each stage. Meaning like if I have a story which one out of 10 people like, that story doesn’t change. One out of 10 people like it in the future as well.

Contagiousness is something different. As long as it travels, it becomes, it gains weight. The more people believe in it, the more trustworthy the story becomes. This is by the way, very important for governments to understand because if they, either if they want to seed an information or if they want to defend a wrong information, they’re going to have to do it.

And so, if you have a story that’s contagious, they need to understand the longer, even a wrong information has traveled, the more weight it becomes. And at some point in time, everybody believes it’s a truth no matter what because so many people somewhat believed in it. So that’s contagiousness. So if you want to get, so forget about virality, the right word is contagiousness.

If you want to get your story contagious, then it depends very much on the right reach as well as the right content. And there are not really good 100% proven ways to do so. And as a, that’s a claim. In order to support this claim, look at the movie industry.

The movie industry very much depends on having a movie which is contagious. And that’s big business. And they spend millions and billions of dollars trying to figure out what is contagious. And they very much came to us, our old company as well, to other companies and trying to figure out, can we use social media to figure out a little bit like this 1% better contagiousness?

But it’s very, very hard. And they didn’t figure it out. So we most likely don’t figure it out. And the stories you see about people telling you stuff gets viral and stuff gets contagious, most of the times it’s somebody who figured out to convince an algorithm that this story is actually a good one.

So the algorithm is the third person in it. It’s not only you creating the story and somebody consuming the story. The algorithm is actually determining how good a story goes. There are loads of examples.

Yeah, that’s very interesting. And we see this all the time with the Wall Street Journal bestseller list, right? There are people that figure out how to game the Wall Street Journal bestseller list. And then once they get on the list, then all of a sudden their book becomes even more of a seller because everybody looks to the list, right?

Yes. Now you’re pointing here to – exactly. So you’re pointing to something which I would say, and if I ever write a book again, it would be about this topic. The biggest pitfall in data is actually us humans itself.

Because we believe so readily in data and believe in that we can predict stuff, which in a lot of areas we can. But as soon as we can, there will be others trying to fake it. And before an organization or before a community has figured out that there is actually wrongdoing happening, time goes by and people have an ability to fake it. And you can – I give you two nice examples.

You talked about the bestseller list. It used to be that the bestseller list in the New York Times is fed by the information how many books you sell. So people would actually go to Amazon after their book is published saying, I’m really in for the fame. If you write a book, you’re not in for the money.

You’re only in for the fame. So I’m really in for the fame. So I buy myself a couple of thousand of my books or 10,000 of my books. And I just trash them and use it for the fine.

I apply some whatsoever. However, I sold those books and I hopefully come to the New York bestseller list. Amazon and New York Times realized that this is the behavior, so they changed the system. Today, if you buy 10,000 books, it only counts as a one.

So you need to have different addresses. So suddenly, there are people, there are organizations who work as a middleman for you to collect addresses to send books to each individual person. So, you know, I know a person who, like, he has not even finished his book. But he goes around and whenever he talks, he says, well, I don’t talk, I take a speaker fee, but I take all the addresses because these guys get a book in a year’s time.

So at the moment when the book is launched, he is, like, sending the book to a load of people signaling to Amazon, this is a good book. And that’s unfortunate, isn’t it? Because that shows you the flaw, like you said, in the system. And by the way, you know, on a side note, I wanted to mention, we interviewed Jonah Berger, who wrote a great book on contagiousness.

I think it’s called Contagious, if I’m not mistaken, in episode 48, which is socialmediaexaminer.com slash 48. If anybody wants to hear a little bit more about that, I don’t know if you know Jonah, you might be familiar with him. I know Jonah. I’m going to download that episode because Jonah is a very, very great guy.

He is an awesome speaker as well as has done some. Very, very good work in the area of content analytics. Hey, just a quick interruption. I want to share something with you.

If I told you that 62% of your peers are using AI tools every single day, would that surprise you? Well, that’s the data that we found in the recent study that we just did. In fact, nearly half of marketers now say that video is their most important content format, more than written, more than visual, and more than audio combined. These are just two statistics.

Two stats that are in our brand new industry report. It’s our 18th annual study. It’s 44 pages long. And over the next couple of days, you can download it for free if you visit socialmediaexaminer.com slash report 26.

Grab your copy now. Okay, let’s get back to the show. So, okay, so let’s step back for a second and talk about what can a business do when they actually have good data? You know, like what?

When you are properly measuring social media, what’s the promise to the business person or the marketer that’s listening? What can it enable? Say it another way. Okay, gotcha.

First, let’s cut out the term good data. There’s only data. Okay. So, it becomes good data if it’s useful.

There’s no good or bad. It’s only useful data. And it becomes only useful if you, as a business, have a right question. So, and that’s the reason why I call the book Ask, Measure, Learn.

Because what many organizations do, they start with measure. They say, what data do I have? Let’s measure them. And then once I have it, then there should be something in to help my business.

But that’s misleading. Start with the ask first. What is it what you want to do? And in the book, I’m actually splitting it down by different departments.

So, we’ll do here the same. Ask yourself, what do you want to do in sales? For example, you want to look for new clients. Okay.

If you want to look for new clients, where are your clients talking? Do they talk even on social media? If your client doesn’t talk on social, like don’t talk on social media, then well, don’t go there. I mean, even if you have the data, it’s like, that’s not useful data.

But if they talk on social media, then let’s figure out who those clients are. And, you know, if they talk on social media, then let’s figure out who those clients are. With very simple searches, I mean, you don’t need a big tool set in this case. With very simple searches, you find those clients and you have some person addressing them, pushing them into a funnel, and then you work like in any sales pitch towards this funnel.

Now, that is totally different from saying, hmm, I need to cover everything in my brand and all the other discussions, because that’s not helpful for sales. If you want to cover everything in brand, well, then you’re on the marketing side and saying, okay, how do I do my brand? Needs different metric. So very important, and this doesn’t make a big difference whether you’re a big company or a small company, think about what you want to achieve.

Start with the ask first. And there might be situations where you have ask, but you do not have the data. Then rather think about how to get to this data rather than saying, well, I don’t do my question. I use the data I have and answer a question I never had.

So once you have the questions and you have the data, what can be the outcome with that data? That’s obviously very, very dependent on the actual ask. So for the sales one, the outcome would be you get to the people who are of interest. We had in the UK, for example, we had the situation at the – as this one newspaper from Murdoch went down under and had to close.

There was suddenly the space that like a huge percentage of the market did not have a Sunday paper. Now, if you are one of the other Sunday papers, you want to know how to reach those people. So one possibility is you start searching for people talking about news of the world. That’s wasn’t enough.

That’s enough. That’s enough. paper and expressing their sadness that they don’t get it the next Sunday or that they don’t get it this Sunday and then reach out to them. That’s one possibility.

There will be a sales area. If you look into the communications area, which we didn’t address so far, another outcome would be, well, communication is about two things, on distributing information as well as controlling the messaging out there. Two different things, meaning two different asks, meaning two different measurements needed. Distribution is easy.

That’s kind of the whole discussion about reach and audience analytics. So do I reach many people and do I reach my right audience? I don’t care whether I’m New York Times when my audience never, ever touches New York Times, despite the fact that New York Times sounds funky. That’s one measurement.

Then how many people do I reach and how well, what’s the likelihood that they ever become a client of ours? The other possibility is to control messaging out there. Then I do care about everything and I’m trying to figure out what it is. And then a potential measurement or potential outcome is, warn me before stories become contagious and negative.

And by the way, negative, negative, that’s another. Let me add something to it. One of the big mysteries in social media measurements is sentiment. Very clearly and between you and me and all the audience out there, it’s bullshit.

In most cases. Obviously, you can create a sentiment tooling, which is very specific to a question. But if you go to a tool and it tells you, oh, I’m going to do this, I’m going to do that, it tells you sentiment. Here it is.

Straight. Without ever asking you what kind of question you have, it most likely will not be what you need. I’m German. And Mike, you’re American.

So what do you say about the statement, Germany beat Brazil 7 to 1? Is it positive or negative? I guess it really depends. Thank you.

If you were to ask me, man, yes, very positive. Very positive. If you ask others, they might not be thinking that this is really positive. So it very much depends.

The same thing, like the human language is such as so difficult to analyze. Same thing if you say, go read the book. Is that positive or negative? Well, if you’re talking about a book, it’s positive.

If you’re talking about a movie, it’s negative. So sentiment is very hard to do. So you need to have a very… If you have a very specific question in mind, if you don’t have a specific question in mind and somebody is offering you sentiment off the shelf, ignore it.

So probably what they’re just doing is some very basic keyword analysis without context is what I hear you saying, right? There are different ways of doing sentiment. It might be even that they are going in… So keyword analysis.

So pretty much you take your… You take your text and look for bad words, negative words and positive words. And then you sum it up. This would be keyword analysis.

And it gets you somewhere. If you do this on the Twitter stream and looking for airlines, you would very clearly get to the place that you understand what people think about United Airlines. And it would not surprise you and would say, yes, whenever I fly with them, I get the same feeling. So those kind of…

How things work. But it’s 140 characters and it’s very limited. And when people talk about it, most likely they express positive or negative emotions. So I have a help there.

It won’t work anymore if you go a little bit more into other brands or into even longer texts. Now then the next thing you can do in technology is that you actually say, we look for the keyword we are looking for for the brand. And we’re working ourselves around it. So we are identifying…

identifying the brand. Like let’s say I want to know what people think about social examiner. I look for the word social examiner and I cut it down by sentences or cut it down by paragraphs and look around that in order to figure out is it positive or negative. It gets you a little bit closer.

It’s often called an aphora resolution. That’s the kind of idea. An aphora means like it’s… I’m not only looking for a social examiner.

I’m looking as well for it, this. And so on and so forth. Gotcha. But still, it doesn’t tell you anything substantial if you have a little bit more complex brand.

Because there might be loads of discussions which doesn’t drive it. So you need to have a specific question. And only when you say people talking about social examiner and the conference you’re going to do in Florida, isn’t it? San Diego.

San Diego. Sorry. Sorry. And the conference in San Diego.

Only… If you… Only look out for those things, then you might be better in luck. Gotcha.

Now, I know a lot of people listening right now are wondering, okay, just to summarize some of the things you’ve said, we need to be asking the right questions first and foremost. Once they’ve got the right questions, what should they be doing or where should they… You know, what’s the next step? Okay.

The next step is asking them in order to answer this question, what is most likely to have an impact on that question? So sit down and just brainstorm around what could be good information to answer this question. Actually, on my website, lutzfinger.com, I offer something which I call like a way how to profile data. Like, you know, like how do you do this?

How do you go through this process? Because once you have then all the list, then you think about, okay, how easy is it for me to get to this data? How likely is it that this data is in… Like that the data is clean, that I don’t have a big error there?

Sentiment, for example, is one of the things where you have a huge error if you don’t take a lot of caution. And how much correlation do I think I can get? And only if you have those, then you start measuring and testing whether this is really your base assumption. Is it really right?

And then you’re in a good spot. And what the industry is doing wrong very often, and I see this over and over, and I warn everybody not to do so, is they only start after this. They start directly with measuring because they believe it’s actually a good thing to do, and take conclusions without having thought about what’s better ways of doing so. Or is there actually a correlation?

Is there actually dependency between what I measure and what I want to achieve? What’s your take on that? Yeah. Take on return on investment.

I know this is… You know, we’ve been doing a study for six years, and measuring ROI seems to be at the top of every marketer’s list, but they never seem to figure it out. Is it possible? Social media ROI?

Yes and no. ROI is not a thing which happens to be around since social media worlds. I mean, ROI has been around since a long time ago. They have been a lot of discussions on the ROI before.

And direct marketers and sales channels always had an easy time to say, oh, this is my ROI. A direct marketer who kind of like would do a mailing campaign with printed catalogs would know, okay, people get the catalog, they call in, and that’s my ROI. And I even know who ordered from the people who I sent the catalog to, and that’s my ROI. Then we had the people who did…

You know, branding campaigns, and they had a way harder time to do an ROI. Now, obviously, every marketer or every branding person would shake their head and say, no, I really figured it out, and we have some metric, and we know. But like, honestly, very tough to do because there are loads of other things. Now, in the case of TV ads, because TV was the only big medium around, yes, you could kind of attribute like, you know, you do that.

You do a lot of spend, and the impact you saw was most likely, the uplift you saw was most likely due to TV because TV was the only thing around. But still, correlation, very hard to measure. Or like direct impact, very hard to measure. Correlation, actually easy to measure, but like direct impact, hard to measure.

So those problems still exist. You have now more channels, meaning you have more possibilities why things are happening. You have more metrics. It doesn’t mean that you have an easy time.

You don’t need to look through a brauchtakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakakak kind of saying I have people clicking on it, I invest in it, and it comes out. Google Ads makes perfect sense for me. And if I do the same thing in G+, and Facebook, and Twitter, and so on, I get a clear return because people click on it and I get a clear return. That’s cool.

So here I have an ROI established. I have a cost in order to do so. And I have so many people buying via this channel. Or if I do it a little bit more funkier and more correct, I do an attribution model for small businesses.

Most of the time it’s not really useful. But if you have a lot of data, then you need an attribution model, meaning you look at how many interactions did I have before people actually came and clicked on it, and then I have my ROI. But if you move over to branding, then it becomes harder and harder to do the ROI. And people are saying, oh, this is terrible.

Why isn’t social media helping? Well, actually, social media, isn’t the solver for it all. It’s just an additional way to get a metric. It’s an additional way to communicate.

It’s an additional channel. So you suddenly have maybe a little bit better way to measure an ROI, but only for the cases where you had an ROI before. Now what you can do, obviously, is trying to make branding as well a transactional business. And more and more people try to do so.

And that is the whole idea of downloading white papers. Or making people signing up for newsletters, and so on and so forth. So you’re actually trying to fill branding, or you’re trying to put branding in the brackets of a transactional model. And then again, people say, oh, no, It works as well, good, with an ROI.

That’s right. But as soon as you go to the real branding stuff, where it kind of just gets an image, imagery, and you kind of want to bring it broad, you don’t want to ask people to sell it, you don’t want to ask people to sell it, you don’t want to ask people to sign up, you want to have a big reach, again, you won’t have an ROI. So it very much depends. Lutz, one of the last questions I want to ask you is suggested tools.

There are people listening that are really small businesses, and some that are every other size you can imagine. What are some resources or tools that you might recommend that would help marketers get their measurement controlled? Okay, gotcha. Tools, yes.

There are loads of tools out there, and that’s very much attributed to the fact because everybody pretty much can build their own tools, and then their company, like, you build a tool, and you think this is so cool that I actually go and launch it as a product. Again, it very much depends on the ask. So the tools which somebody in sales will need are different from the tools in marketing, are different from the tools in PR, are different from the tools in, if you have a productizable thing where you need social, are different in the tools you would need for HR. Let’s focus on marketing.

Marketing, okay. If you do marketing, then you have more or less two big areas. One is the whole area of marketing automatization, trying to make sure you capture interest, you generate stuff, and you push it out. Okay.

And the other area is the whole area on content, so that you have the right content for the right needs. Or set it very simple, reach versus content. And you have tools in each of those areas. Now, if you want to start small, go with something like If Then Then That or Zapier or something which helps you to automate in order to create reach.

You hook up all the different tools, you write ones, and you get your stuff simplified by pushing it out to all different channels. Okay, hold on one second. If Then, what was that again? If Then Then That is like an acronym, right?

I-F something. Yeah, exactly. It’s I-F-T-T-T dot com. If Then Then That.

And what was the other one? Zapier. Z-A-P-I-E-R dot com, I think. Okay.

These are tools who link up APIs. They’re free. They’re very simple to use for anybody who is a small business. Kind of saying, okay, I want to, I write a blog post, and after I write the blog post, I want to push it out to the different channels without going in and doing this manually.

That would be one way of doing it. Or I actually even use a search, and once ever I have a search, I want to phase those things into my other tools. Those kind of tool connectors are something where I would start when I would start small on the reach generation part. Now, if you’re looking for other tools in the marketing space, and you look to invest more, well, then you have the big names, Marketo, HubSpot, TrackMaven, who gives you always an ability to track a little bit like, how much reach you’re generating to track what’s happening in the different networks which are connecting.

That’s the funnel side of marketing, the reach side of marketing. That should be the side which comes up with an ROI, a good ROI. So if you use those tools, some of them are actually pretty hefty in cost. Make sure that you have your ROI, the question formulated in a way that the ROI actually is correct, and you should get one.

Awesome. The other side of the equation is actually, what kind of content do I use? And as I said, it’s not only reach, it’s as well content dependency, and that’s what everybody today goes around and talks about content marketing. There are good tools out there.

If you go and publish on LinkedIn, for example, you have the ability to see what your audience is. LinkedIn has now the special ability to see seniority level, industry, and so on and so forth. So if you are, with your brand on LinkedIn, you actually can see this. Who is reading my article?

Who is following me? They have very detailed analytics on who are the people who will come in. Way better than anybody else, I would claim. Now, if you’re looking for other good tools out there, if you’re saying, actually, I don’t want to be confined to LinkedIn as a platform.

I rather want to do this on other social networks, then possibilities there are, but of course, LinkedIn’s business model’s business model is fundamentally motivated by LinkedIn’s business model. LinkedIn’s business model’s business model is motivated by LinkedIn’s business model’s business model’s business model’s business model’s business model’s business model’s figuring out in a structured way what’s trending, what’s the information flow, Contently, NewsCred, those are all tools. And those are tools which you can’t easily build by yourself. Percolate was the second one?

Percolate was the second one, Contently, and NewsCred. It’s difficult for anybody to build those tools by themselves. Now, all of them have slightly different nuances and kind of like usability and whether they are in the right spot. But all of them trying to answer for you the question of what is actually information I should talk about?

What is my audience caring about? Perfect. Difference between LinkedIn and all of the rest is in the rest you need to define your audience. In LinkedIn, it’s the audience you have as followers.

Awesome. Well, Lutz, I know we could talk about this all day, but we’ve come to the end. And I know that a lot of people would love to get their hands on your book and learn and discover more about you. So where can they find your book, Ask, Measure, Learn?

And where can they find out more about Lutz Finger? Well, the book they can find in all major bookstores, in Amazon, in Barnes & Nobles, everywhere. Ask, Measure, Learn. Finger like the hand and it should get them there.

Now, if they… We are living in exciting times. I believe that as social analytics or analytics of social data is probably having a bigger impact or analytics on data as such, having a bigger impact than the onset of the Internet has. And I know that this is a bold statement because the Internet had a huge impact. But what you will see over time is that we understand way more about what people like, the Internet enabled us to do things in a way faster and more convenient.

But those things we did before. We mailed, we shopped, we searched. We did all of this before. Now, social analytics actually is different in a way because it allows us to do things which we did not do that well before.

And that’s new. So there is a… It’s a shift. And we will see stunning stuff. Now, since there is a lot of things ongoing, one thing is obviously to go with.

Okay. But the other thing is come to my website, LutzFinger.com, L-U-T-Z, Finger.com. Or follow me on LinkedIn. You can find me.

There’s only one Lutz Finger on LinkedIn. And I will update you regularly on new things which I’m seeing in that exciting industry. Lutz Finger, thank you so much for sharing your insight with us today. I know on behalf of many listeners, you were awesome.

Thank you very much. Absolutely. You have a good day. Well, I hope you got a lot out of that interview.

If you missed anything that we talked about in the interview or earlier in the show, you can get all the details in the show notes. We take the notes for you. Socialmediaexaminer.com slash 107 for episode 107. By the way, if you’re not already a subscriber, be sure to subscribe to the show using whatever podcast player so that you never miss a future episode of our show.

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This brings us to the end of another episode of the Social Media Marketing Podcast. I’m your host, Michael Stelzner. I’ll be back with you next week. I hope you make the absolute best out of your day and may social media continue to change your world.

The Social Media Marketing Podcast is a production of… Social Media Examiner. Be sure to check out Michael’s other podcast, Parenting Adventures. Dad, I’m bored.

Heard this before? If so, you’re not alone. Grab a torch and join us for Parenting Adventures as we bring fun back to the family. Visit parentingadventures.com.

Parenting Adventures.com. Hey, thanks for listening. Before you head out, I wanted to personally recommend that you download our brand new industry report. I’ve been publishing this study for 18 years.

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Thanks.