One Way to Evaluate a Social Campaign

Social media has become one of the biggest enigmas of the Digital Age. It is widely accepted as not just a means for socialization, but also a viable marketing strategy. As brands quickly find new and interesting ways to utilize social media as a marketing vehicle, they all hit the same roadblock: how to measure success? Here is one way that we like to measure our social media success.

  The equation we prefer for valuing our social media campaigns is: V = (n/1,000) x CPM. It’s just like 7^th grade math class all over again: the goal of this equation is to solve for V, or the value of your social media impressions. N is the number of impressions your social media activity racked up. Let’s use the Facebook aspect of our Gaga’s Workshop Facebook campaign as an example. When all was said in done, Facebook clocked that campaign at 79 MILLION impressions.

  So let’s say the CPM (cost per 1,000 impressions) of an ad that reached those same people was $.296. $.296 is the current rough average CPM on Facebook’s ad platform. 79,000,000 divided by 1000 is 79,000. 79,000 multiplied by a $.296 CPM equals a value of $23,384! In other words, by harnessing the power of social media effectively, we garnered impressions that would have cost $23,384 in paid advertisements! Creating content that is engaging on social media has the economic value of an average midsized sedan.

  However, until a universally accepted measurement metric is created, it is still a matter of personal preference. Much like a pound versus a kilogram, there may not be consensus of unit but there is no debating the existence of weight. Social media may not have an standard unit for measuring value, but no one is disputing the fact that value exists.