Social marketing v. traditional print media

If your camp is doing a lot of traditional print media (newsletters, newspaper ads, magazine ads, etc.) then it is really important to measure your success against your social marketing. Most print media only has two measurement qualities:

1. Reach:

How many people received your newspaper/magazine/newsletter? (There is no way to know how many people actually read it, but this is a good enough metric to lean on.)

2. Response to your call to action:

How many people either dialed the number or emailed the address that you put in your advertisement? (If you didn’t have a call to action then you missed a huge opportunity to measure this response.)

These same two metrics can be very easily measured in social media. And in social media we know that reach actually means people who saw your piece of content not just subscribers to the print medium. Response is also very easy to measure in social media as we can use link clicks, likes, comments, emails and phone calls as our proxy.

Have you been comparing your social marketing to traditional print media? What have you seen in terms of results? The more you compare your different mediums, the more you can see what is actually working for your summer camp and what is not.