Lift9 Blog Social Media Solutions

Search and Equivalent Value

Jason Falls is considered to be one of the premier listeners in social media.  He has written many detailed comparisons of the monitoring tools as well as documented best practices in social media monitoring.  Today he wrote a great post which outlines how to determine the value of your social media conversations based on paid search keyword equivalent values. Jason demonstrates the equivalent value of search traffic equivalency (organic value compared to paid search cost per click) with his own blog as an example.  By applying the paid search costs to actual traffic garnered from all social media conversations, Jason has determined the equivalent value in website traffic from social media. With some simple arithmetic and further work with web analytics, once could determine actual conversions or goals resulting from social media.  This is very encouraging as it helps to put a quantifiable dollar metric on social media and further the ROI conversation.

Lift9 clients are probably nodding their heads as we've often discussed this type of analysis.  One thing that we usually provide is a spreadsheet which shows the social media equivalent value as Jason describes above, but we break the keywords out by social media channel.

Social Media Equivalent Value by Channel

Thus, in the above example, we can determine not only value attributable to Twitter and other channels, but also which keywords.  This helps clients to understand relevant conversations within the social media channels and how to better prioritize their resources.  In the above example, 1/3 of the value of all forum conversations is around pre-sales pricing questions yet customer service conversations are more impactful on Twitter. By using equivalent value, clients can assign pre-sales people to focus on relevant forums and customer service specialists to answer questions on Twitter.  Thus, the right experts (and conversations) can be applied to the right channel.

How else could you see equivalent value utilized?