In the last post, I described the 1st of 7 crucial elements of social media ROI: “Know How Social Media Integrates the Vision of Your Church”. Today, I’m tackling the 2nd of 7 crucial elements: “Decide What’s Measurable and What’s Not”.
Last week I hinted at this with the quote from the famous philosopher, Galileo:
“Measure what can be measured, and make measurable what cannot be measured.”
One last recap from last week before diving into the 2nd Crucial Element: You can measure anything, to a point. Some measurements can be measured precisely. Other measures, such as spiritual growth, are measured along the lines of “more like this” or “less like that” and have indicators (such as ‘spiritual fruit’).
The Exponential Reach of Social Media
Social media is a blurry interchange of personal, professional, private and public lines. Once something is on the internet, it’s permanent in one fashion or another, so social media is a new type of engagement that has a kind of permanency unlike previous communications. History that was recorded prior to the internet was managed and owned by few people, relative to humanity.
Social media is history being recorded and shared in real-time, all the time.
The volume of content has increased at a near incalculable, exponential rate. Whereas the few were publishers of content in the past, today everyone can be a publisher and, simultaneously, a distributor of content.
This paradigm shift is consequential in our context of the local church, because the ability to find, connect, engage and disciple people has, literally, no limits. Here in our Western culture, the local church movement has changed over the years from a few vocational pastors discipling some portion of their community, to many non-vocational pastors (those of us not working at a local church) having the reach and visibility to disciple groups of people (Facebook friends, Twitter followers, etc.).
Decide What’s Measurable
The exponential reach of social media (it’s not just who I know, but they people they know and the people they know, on and on…) has given voice to everyone. The problem is that if everyone’s talking, it’s hard to cut through the clutter. That’s why we must be listening more than we talk on social media.
Active listening is the first step of deciding what to measure for your social media ROI.
Define Your Demographics & Channels
Generally speaking, local churches have two basic groups of people to measure and two distinct kinds of social media avenues to explore:
- TWO BASIC GROUPS:
- Those who are active “members” or “attendees” in the life of your church
- Those who are not yet plugged into the life of your church (your communities)
- TWO SOCIAL MEDIA AVENUES:
- Personal staff/lay leadership social media accounts
- Ministry/Group social media accounts
Measuring the reach and effectiveness of your social media efforts starts with identifying the target audience and the quantifiable goals for engaging them. Therefore, it’s easy to start with your church/ministry accounts and get the low-hanging fruit of your existing members and attendees. After all, they’re the most likely to ‘like’ your Fan Pages and follow church and ministry-specific Twitter accounts.
For example, build a fan page for your church on Facebook and use your existing communications channels (from the stage, announcements, videos, website, church bulletin, etc.) to promote and request people to ‘like’ it on Facebook. This provides a baseline of both an audience and, over time, a way to calculate the adoption rate (growth) of your ‘fans’. You can then begin setting goals for the obvious numerical increase in fans per week/month and the less obvious things like trend data, such as:
- Which kinds of posts get the most comments, re-tweets, wall-posts and mentions?
- During which day of the week are people most active? What time of day?
- What is the click-through rate from your other electronic communications to your social media properties?
- How any people signed up for an activity or event via electronic registration through a social media page?
- Based on the activity or event, are you reaching certain age groups/demographics more effectively?
In this example, Facebook provides every fan page with an “insights” page that gives you good, trackable data. Your website should also have measurable data (for free with Google Analytics), which you can compare and overlay against the data from Facebook. Over time, if you capture this externally and review it for trend analysis, you’ll begin to see what works and what doesn’t.
Decide What’s Not Measurable
Numbers alone are not enough data to declare success. With Twitter, many people and organizations subscribe to the model of “follow and be followed”, wherein they follow everyone they can in the hopes of getting a lot of reciprocal follows. It’s not terribly hard to have thousands (or tens of thousands) of followers on Twitter, but it’s not necessarily an indicator of real growth or, especially, effectiveness.
Organic growth (earned) is best, because it represents people choosing to seek out your social media channels (both ministry accounts and personal staff and lay leader accounts). These are higher quality and are weighted as being more valuable than thousands of people that follow but never bother to engage.
Deciding on what’s not measurable (or easily measured), such as the sentiment of your followers, means you’re looking for other indicators (what can be easily measured) like re-tweets, lots of comments or plenty of back-and-forth conversation. These indicators, especially as they increase in both the number of fans/follower and the frequency of their engagement, are the kinds of intuitive signs of growth and effectiveness.
Determine a Strategy and Tweak Frequently
Once you understand your baseline and basic measurements, you can develop a strategy for increasing your effectiveness (and efficiency, too). It’s important to make sure you do this in the right order:
- What is your Objective for Social Media?
- What Goals have you put in place? (A goal isn’t a goal if it’s not measurable and time-based. “X” happening by “Y” date).
- What Strategies will help you accomplish each goal?
- What are the Actions (tasks) that make up each of your strategies?
Your objective shouldn’t change, as this is your main purpose. Your goals may shift slightly over time. Your strategies will require tweaking as you learn the most effective methods. Your actions are always in flux, based on the time, manpower and technology (systems) you commit.
In case you haven’t noticed, this is a lot of work over an extended period of time (with no end date, I might add).
It’s easy to have a Facebook page or Twitter account that you use as a bully pulpit. It’s far more difficult to increase your true reach and increase engagement through these very relational channels without a good deal of planning, effort and consistency.
Are you ready to decide what you will and will not measure? Will you commit the time and be consistent in your efforts to leverage this unprecedented set of tools to reach more people than ever before? Are you prepared to sow and reap a digital harvest with actual souls attached to those names?
This task is not insignificant, but it’s the most far-reaching medium we’ve ever had to fulfill the Great Commission.
