Companies and brands have refined processes and systems for ascribing value to their physical assets and bricks and mortar properties but when it comes to the measuring of their online properties value there is mostly a big yawn.
We live in a knowledge economy where information is vital and critical to ongoing success as we transition to a post industrial age where workers don’t carry bricks but laptops, iPads and iPhones.
Increasing the value of your online assets which displays a brands knowledge and thought leadership to the world should be made a priority for any modern business.
These assets are now not just restricted to online properties you own such as your website but anywhere you have a web presence and this includes your social media channels.
What are Social Media Assets?
Online assets are not just your website, it is any web presence that makes it easy for customers and prospects to find you and engage with you and this includes any social media channels that you participate on as an organisation. These channels could include the company blog, Facebook page and YouTube channel.
These channels are where prospects ‘start’ buying from you whether you are aware of it or not.
Social media is transforming the web and with the rise of Facebook there has been an unseemly gold rush by brands to make their online presence more social. This social participation broadens and deepens the reach and influence significantly of any brand and organisation.
Google is Taking Social Very Seriously
Google’s announcement and field trial of its Google+ social networking platform has revealed how serious Google is taking the socialization of the web and the threat of Facebook to its core revenue stream. Google group product manager Christian Oestlien said
“Google+ is just the beginning of a very long journey towards making Google , our properties and products more social”
So focused is Google in its endeavours on becoming more social is the fact that the Google+ project has had 30 plus enterprise wide project teams working on the new social platform for more than 12 months and Google’s executives incentives are tied to its success.
Ideas on Valuing your Social Media Assets
Companies and organisations in their marketing audit should be assigning value to their social online properties and here is a core concept and some ideas to consider.
Take the top line core value for each social media asset and attribute a simple numerical value and then come to an overall headline total that can be called your social media asset valuation index.
Here are six social media assets that you could attribute a value to.
Blog
The value you should be measuring here includes key elements such as the amount of traffic, inbound links to the blog articles (that is the number of websites and blogs that are hyperlinking to your content) and the number of comments. To kick off the the core measurement value without overcomplicating it, just take one key measurable asset to start with and an example of this could be the number of page views per month.
Example: Blog page views per month: 10,000
Facebook’s value to an organisation starts with ‘likes’ or the number of fans, liking of content and comments and links left on the page.
Core value to initially measure could be the number of ‘Fans’ on your organisations Facebook ‘Page’.
Example: Facebook Fans: 1,000
How do you measure the value of Twitter? This could include the number of followers, the number of retweets and the traffic that it drives to your blog. To start let’s ascribe the number of Twitter followers as being a valuable social media asset to measure. In measuring this I am not devaluing what is also important such as the quality of the those that follow you on Twitter and if they are following you because of the value of the content you are tweeting that leads back to your blog that is relevant and targeted to their topics of interest.
Example: Twitter followers: 3,000
YouTube
YouTube can be your TV channel where you can educate your prospects and customers. The numbers to measure here include subscribers and the the number of views.
Example: YouTube views: 6,000
LinkedIn is a more closed community than Facebook or Twitter and its value is measured essentially three key ways and they are the number of connections, quality of the connections and the level of engagement. Quality and engagement are hard to definitively measure.
Example: LinkedIn Connections: 600
SlideShare
This platform’s value is often underestimated or often ignored but showcasing the knowledge of the organisation in a presentation format can have long lasting residual value. On Slideshare you can measure, views, downloads and embeds as well as other elements such as retweets and Facebook ‘shares’. To keep it simple we can just measure the number of views.
SlideShare Views: 1,000
Example: Total Social Media Asset Valuation Index: 21,600
Now, this is just a high level quantification example of your social media assets valuation that can be helpful in providing a top level snapshot in time that can be quite revealing.
This should not diminish in any way ascribing value to the quality component of important elements of online social engagement and other qualitative measurements.
Are you investing in your on line assets?
What is your social media asset valuation and is this worth measuring?
Image by whoswho
