How Do You Measure Social Media's Impact On Your Brand?

WORKOUT ANYTIME COO Mark de Gorter and Philly Pretzel Factory Marketing Manager Adam Terranova share their thoughts on what makes the biggest difference.

By Nick Powills1851 Franchise Publisher

SPONSOREDUpdated 2:14PM • 07/14/16

Measuring the impact of something intangible can be a challenge, especially when it comes to evaluating social media. Calculating ROI is vital to understanding social media’s brand impact, but determining this comes from developing a clear set of evaluation criteria that is best for your brand.

To help understand this process, we asked some of the pros from two very different brands that have a very similar love for social media: WORKOUT ANYTIME* COO Mark de Gorter and Philly Pretzel Factory Marketing Manager Adam Terranova.

STEP 1: Find the best tool for your brand.

With social new platforms constantly being developed and existing ones constantly evolving, it is important to identify which is the most impactful on your brand and really put an emphasis on that. What are your brand fans responding to? Where are most customers telling you they heard about your LTO?

Mark: We’ve found that Facebook is the primary channel to measure our impact on social media, both in terms of engagement and eventual membership sales. We’ve seen our exposure and engagement levels rise steadily since we began implementing Facebook as the cornerstone of our social activity.

Adam: For us, it is Facebook by far. You really have to know who your audience is and what they respond to, and use that to determine what platform to put the most emphasis on. Facebook is not only a tool to access our customers, but it is a great way tool for measuring our presence and social growth.

STEP 2: Have an established goal in mind for every campaign in order to evaluate ROI:

Every campaign is different, and therefore should be treated as such with a well thought-out social plan that is a best fit to reach that end goal.

Mark: On the sales-building side, we utilize social media—primarily Facebook—to offer trial memberships to potential members in the local communities. We then track the click-stream traffic to see if the trial memberships are downloaded, then ultimately if they are used and converted to membership enrollments.

Adam: It really depends what your objective is, and you can build the campaign from that. For example, sometimes it is a social media holiday, in which our goal is to promote heavily and see how this moves sales transactions on a day-by-day basis. For example, last year for National Hot Dog Day, social media was the only promotion we used -- so succeeding with this came from developing a clear plan in advance, and then the success of this was a direct correlation with how well our social campaign worked.

STEP 3: Look at the bigger picture:

Often times, the success of social media is not something that can be evaluated instantly, and is something that cannot even be observed on the platform it originated from. Instead, it can be seen in the ways it is translated into tangible opportunities.

Mark: We utilize social media on the brand-building side by working to establish emotional connections with our members and prospective members. We start with overarching social media campaigns that run across our network sites through our in-house social media team, posting inspirational stories and photos that trigger a “that’s me” response… If we can get the ball rolling at the top by seeding the type of inspiration we feel best represents the brand and our members, the community will take over and prolong the conversation in the areas we feel important to building the brand.

Adam: The thing with social media is that it is more about how you use it to impact other mediums. An example is the presidential pretzels we introduced on social media this year. What began as a fun way to reach fans opened up the door for us to get picked up by national news such as Good Morning America, Fox & Friends, and other big outlets. What it showed us is how much you can really use social media as a vehicle to reach larger mediums.

*This brand is a paid partner of 1851 Franchise. For more information on paid partnerships please click here.

How Do You Measure Social Media's Impact On Your Brand?

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