How to Maximize and Measure Social Advocacy

In this week's readings (Measuring the Impact of Your Social Media Program, and Rules of Social Media Engagement), our professor, Alan Rosenblatt, explained some key ways to maximize and then measure the influence of a campaign that uses social media for advocacy purposes -- what Dr. Rosenblatt calls "social advocacy." These are summarized below.

Reach
A social advocacy campaign should focus on reaching as many people as possible -- or maximizing impressions. How many people did you get your message in front of? Not everyone in your audience will read or engage with your message, but knowing how many people were exposed to it is still an important measure to understand. The more people you reach, the more likely you are to drive up the number of people who engage with your social advocacy program.

Helpful tools for measuring reach include hashtags, and tracking followers or fans.

Engagement
The number of people who engage with your campaign will always be smaller than the number of people you reach -- but engagement is usually the whole goal of social advocacy. For instance, a social advocacy program may aim to engage supporters in re-tweeting the message, posting it on their facebook wall, or sending a message to a policymaker.

Tools to measure engagement include tracing retweets, followers, mentions, comments, etc. Interesting tip: data from a facebook page can be downloaded into excel for easier analysis. I never knew that!

Driving Web Traffic Home
While visits to your website are not as central to social advocacy as engagement, they can still be an important way to get your message out. You can drive traffic to your website by linking to it in social advocacy efforts. On Twitter, it's important to keep the URL short using tools like bit.ly in order to use most of your 140 maximum characters for the message.

For links to the resources, tools and services available to measure some of this difficult-to-find information, like how often you are retweeted, check out these articles. They will be very helpful to anyone trying to maximize and measure their social advocacy impact.