Using facebook to measure marketing: is your facebook page generating results? Here are ways to both monitor and measure your social media efforts.

• Author: Price, Mark

IN THESE DAYS OF MEASURED MARKETING, where accountability of spending is one of the greatest issues, any tactic that cannot be linked to changes in customer behavior will inevitably fail, whetheror not a bank's CEO thinks it is "cool."

Many of the severe cuts in marketing are due to the failure to quantify the value of the specific marketing tactic to the bottom line. When the numbers are tight and the CFO looks for budget cuts, what is not measured is what gets cut.

Now enter Facebook.

Facebook is clearly a cause celebre of financial executives everywhere; After all, with everyone on the planet on Facebook (a half a billion members or so), how can we not market to our customers on a fan page and through ads as well, right? Well, if you find out that you have only a few hundred fans, and the customers who come through Face-book ads are primarily discount shoppers, the picture becomes more complex. For financial services, the challenge is even greater--what do you want your customers to do, and how can Facebook help make that happen? After all, the goal for most institutions is not to engage with promotionally oriented customers who want free checking; it is to deepen relationships with the high-potential customers. At first, Facebook may seem to be an unlikely place to achieve that goal.

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But Facebook has more going for it than it might seem: You just have to figure out how to measure the impact to the bottom line. Some community banks around the country are doing this successfully, and they are teaching other institutions valuable lessons.

Access point for customer advocates

Take BankAtlantic (assets: $4.7 billion) in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. It's a community bank that's making Facebook an integral part of its marketing push. The effort is also demonstrating measurable results.

The bank is using Facebook as an access point to its "advocate" customers. We take the opportunity to answer the questions on the wall and post additional information about that topic in case other customers have similar questions, says Sharon Stennett-Lyn, vice president of investor relations and corporate communications at BankAtlantic. "We use that as a learning opportunity for what information our customers might be looking for and often times apply that knowledge to post the information on the home page, product page, or Twitter with the idea that if one person was looking for that answer, there may be others."

Not only that, but they are...