Social Media Metrics for Travel Marketers: Measuring Awareness

How aware is your social network?

In part one of my Social Media Metrics posting, I discussed setting goals for your campaign. If you missed it, you can read it here. In this post, I’d like to share some ways that you can look at awareness in social networks. Let’s start with Facebook.

Gaining insights from Facebook Insights

If you’ve set up your Facebook fan page correctly, you have access to a (fairly) new tool called Insights, which you can access from your “like” page. The Insights tab lets you take a look at your audience’s interaction with your page over time, and offers geographic and demographic background. Insights provides details on:

• subscribes and unsubscribes
• new and removed fans
• top countries
• demographics
• page views
• media consumption

The administrators of the page will also receive a weekly email that gives a quick summary of your page for the week (how many fans you added, number of wall posts or likes and how many page views you received for the week). These insights can help you determine what is driving consumers to your page - whether it’s posts about offers, things to do in or around your destination, or articles relevant to your customers. Knowing what they interact with – or tend to ignore –can help you drive your content strategy.

Tracking Twitter retweets and click data

Twitter doesn’t spell everything out so easily for you, but here are a couple of tips to help you track what people are saying about your destination. You should be looking at retweets of your posts on a daily or every other day basis. If someone says something about your destination, whether it is positive or negative, you want to be able to respond to it. Take a look at those who tag you in their post (@destination name). This can be a good way to get links to people’s photos or to monitor customer experiences. One other recommendation when posting something to Twitter: use bit.ly to create a shortened, unique URL. Bit.ly is great because it not only shortens really long links, it also gives you real-time click data, which you might find useful.

Coming soon – more ways to track social media.