What is the best way to measure PR?
Is it eyeballs (the number of pairs of eyes that see a piece about your organisation, product or service) or is it multiplying the cost of what it would have been to advertise by three?
Over the years, there have been a number of different tactics used for measuring PR including measuring column inches to counting media hits to tallying social media mentions.
It is important to guage the effectiveness of PR with real numbers: how else do you know whether your message is working?
Here are some of the tactics we use:
How far does your message reach, and how interested are your readers? This can include website visits, shares on Facebook and retweets on Twitter.
Track what people are saying or writing about you: this will help you work out how likely your audience is to invest in your product or service.
Measure the effectiveness: did that tweet to a reporter secure an interview with your CEO? Did a well-placed article bring in volunteers? How did a poor interview affect your brand?
In our view, measuring the effectiveness is the most important of all three tactics.
However none of the above is of any use at all if you do not do something with the data. You need to respond to the data in order to tweak your PR campaign if need be.
Social media ROI
We were interested to read a recent article in mumbrella about the value of social media.
According to the report which cites research published by Eventbrite, Twitter delivers up to four times more revenue and page views for companies than any other form of social media
The analysis conducted on Eventbrite’s 2013 sales, showed that a single share on Twitter generated $10.90 for Australian firms, dwarfing Facebook’s $4.10 and LinkedIn’s $3.20.
Oveseas the picture is different:, a tweet is worth an additional $5.70, Facebook $3.40 and LinkedIn $1.
This piece is one of the first pieces of research that has attempted to quantify the return of investment of social media.