Once, when I was representing social media on an arts marketing panel, a fellow panelist said to me, one-on-one, something along the lines of “okay, but how does this sell tickets?” I guess I didn’t get that point across!
I gave him the short answer. Since you can track how a visitor moves through your site, you can see whether a blog reader clicks on the “buy tickets” button, or takes a more circuitous path to making a purchase, or abandons the site altogether. It doesn’t matter if it’s a blog or a traditional web site; this is something you can track.
It’s probably something your boss wants to know.
The longer answer is about social media metrics and the complexity of conversation, and it’s not really an answer.
There is a lot of great writing and research out there, by people like Beth Kanter and Rachel Happe, about finding the right social media metrics for nonprofit organizations.
Metrics like:
- unique visitors
- returning visitors
- feed subscribers
- page views
- comments
- tags
- “friends”
- bookmarks
Rachel has a huge list here. And some great posts from Beth are here and here.
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If your goal is simply to sell orchestra or theater or museum tickets, well, it’s fairly easy to calculate the ROI of social media. You know the revenue from tickets sold through the blog, and you know the cost of time spend blogging and any other associated costs, like web hosting.
So what about using social media metrics to achieve longer-term goals, like relationship-building?
You might think of social media the way you think of social events you throw for your patrons or donors, or prospective patrons (you know – those singles nights at the opera). You could have two events and one takes place in a parallel universe: they cost the same to throw, in the same venue, and the very same people attend.
Stay with me here.
Later on you can see whether any of those people renewed his or her subscription. But at one, the social interactions are lackluster. In the parallel universe, the conversation flows, and people have a memorable time.
How do you measure the cost of quality versus tepid conversation?
In the face-to-face world, relationships take time to develop. You can’t expect to throw one party and find that, over night, ticket sales have soared. Same thing with social media.
If we’re talking about a blog, the growth in the number of comments over time can tell you something about the level of engagement. But looking at the quality of the comments can be important, too. Is there a real conversation going on?
Greg Sandow’s blog is a great example of social media that sparks conversation – the comments are almost as thought-provoking as the posts.
You might have 59,0097 fans on Facebook (kudos!), but how many of them are writing on your wall, and what are they writing?
My point is that the number of unique visitors to your blog or the number of people following you on twitter is only part of the story.
You might need hard numbers to convince your boss and your board that social media should be part of your arts marketing strategy, but for a more thorough assessment of your efforts, don’t forget the soft data.
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What are your arts organization’s social media metrics?
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Thanks for sharing this valuable information. very insightful.
-jomie-
Posted by: best digital pr firms | September 07, 2009 at 10:46 PM
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Posted by: Dissertation Samples | October 15, 2009 at 09:47 AM