In public relations, we all have of course do primary research before we implement our campaigns to make sure that we are aware of the industry we are working in for our clients as well as who are our primary and secondary audiences and publics. Of course, we have to make sure that we set reasonable objectives and proactive strategies with our campaign as well – that is important.
But one of the most important steps for a PR professional to do is to take the time to evaluate the overall campaign. Did we meet our objectives? What was the overall outcome? Evaluation is definitely key for public relations campaigns because it allows us to see how we did in terms of our strategies, messages, and tactics and an opportunity to learn from these experiences. With the increase of social media – how do public relations professionals do this?
Well, there are several ways to do this – and there is a great article that appeared on Mashable that discusses how to analyze social media hits and how to track your article online. It also appears that more corporations that are implementing social media into their public relations and marketing campaigns are also starting to form rankings on where they stand in terms of their social media strategies. Ford was recently mentioned as being ranked #1 among car brands on Vitrue’s “Social Media Index” for the number of mentions on their web sites. On their web site, Virtue discusses its methodology and how it determines its social media rankings.
Here are some other suggestions that public relations professionals may want to consider also in terms of evaluating their social media campaign:
- Keep track of what is being said about you both through traditional search engines as well as social media search engines like Samepoint and Social mention.
- Look at the web site statistics. This can be done by having a web site tracker and looking at how many people have been directed to your web site and where they came from. This gives you an idea of what issues and topics are of interest to your target audiences.
- Determine who are the key influencers are on Twitter by looking at the number of Retweets. This can be done by using Twitter search engines like Twitter search and Twazzup.
- Make sure to evaluate all of the possible social media applications that you use. I have seen in various PR campaigns that agencies have these great strategies and tactics that use social media, but they do not say in their evaluation section on how they determined if these were successful or not.
Hope you all are having a great day! 🙂
Best Wishes,
Karen
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