Measuring Your Brand’s Online Value
Determine Keywords and Phrases Associated with Your Brand
The first step is to use a package that you’re using with your website (such as Google Analytics), and then think of keywords and phrases that you would like clients or customers to associate with your brand. For example, if you are a Chinese Restaurant in the Gold Coast, key words you might want to associate with your brand will be “Chinese Cuisine”, “Szechuan dishes”, “Kung Pao chicken”, “Tea smoked duck”, “Twice cooked pork”,“hotpot”, then your region, city and street address. Then, you can add phrases such as “loved it”, “hated it”, “delicious”, “terrible”, and so on.
Monitor Mentions Using Several Online Tools
- Google Alerts
- Using the keywords and phrases, you can now have Google Alerts find these words (as associated with your brand) and email the results to you. These results are links to the blog, message board, article or review mentioning your brand.
- SocialMention
- SocialMention zeroes in on social media, and monitors mentions of your brand and keywords on Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google, etc.
- Social mention also provides you with statistics, not just the instances of brand/keyword mentions, sentiment ratings, top keywords used in conjunction with your brand, top users of your brand name (those mentioning it the most), strength, and reach.
- Technorati
- If you want to focus on what bloggers are posting about your brand, this service scours through nearly 1.3 million blogs for all mentions of the brand or keyword/phrases that you enter in the search field.
Count How many People You Have Reached
If you have a specific message or promotion, post or tweet it. For Twitter, count your number of followers, then the followers who have retweeted your message. For Facebook metrics, use its “Insights” feature (which you can find inside “edit page”) to track the total number of fans for your page, the number of friends from those who became fans during a promotion and those who commented on or liked your posts to identify the potential monthly Facebook reach.
Organize Your Data
Build a worksheet in Excel that highlights the key metrics that you’ve been keeping track of then regularly update and monitor and evaluate.
