You might be doing social media but do you know what social media is doing for you? If the answer is no, then maybe it’s time to assess your key social media metrics, says Claire Weekes
Social media is now on the agenda of most brands, and for some, gone are the days of experimentation with the medium. Rather social media strategy has become ingrained within the heart of the marketing mix. Yet for otherss – and perhaps this is especially the case for B2B brands – there remains scepticism over what this channel can deliver in terms of actual benefits. The bolder of the B2C brands (think ASOS and Burberry) are now going as far as to sell direct to consumers through channels like Facebook. But in B2B land, many are still struggling to prove to the board that a social media strategy works, and is a form of cost effective marketing.
Part of the problem seems to be down to the fact that even when a brand is attempting to engage with its audience through social media, marketers aren’t necessarily aware of the metrics they should measure their activity against. Yes we all know how to count and compare our number of Twitter followers or Facebook ‘likes’, but what do these actually mean when you try to marry them to business objectives? Too many companies do what they know they can easily measure, ignoring what their actual objectives are because they don’t know how to make social media work in order to achieve them. The mismatch between measurement and objectives is nothing new, but social media has certainly added to this problem.
The key to breaking this challenge down is to really think about what you want your social media strategy to achieve. Too many brands jump in feet first because they feel that they have to be ‘in the space’ without knowing what they want to get out of their efforts. It’s often not as simple as saying ‘We want to achieve ROI from social media,’ because the journey from setting up a social media presence to generating direct sales from it, is not that straightforward.
The following is a list of key social media metrics, all of which should be perfectly achievable. But before embarking on a social media strategy, brands need to consider what they want to get out of it – followers, keeping leads warm or detailed competitor insight?
1. Followers
Your number of followers is the measure of how many people sign up, follow, subscribe via RSS or ‘like’ you across Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, your blog, etc. But what is the business benefit in having lots of followers? Our B2C counterparts are starting to make direct sales through social media channels. More handy in the B2B world, says Guy Levine, CEO of agency Return On Digital, is to think of your followers as the modern day version of the email database. “We all know the money is in the list,” says Levine. “If you have thousands of followers, you have a marketplace to market to. The only limitation is the difference between subscribers and active subscribers. It’s great having 50,000 Twitter followers but how many read your tweets or retweet you?”
2. Sentiment
Sentiment is the measure of what people are saying about your brand – and how much of that is positive, negative or neutral. “This needs to be the heart of every social media strategy to see how well it is being received. As businesses, we need to know when to amplify the good things people say and when to join in a conversation which is causing negative brand impact,” says Levine. “The only challenge with sentiment is tracking it. There are tools that will do it for you but they can be expensive and doing it manually takes time.”
Sentiment might sound like a wishy-washy metric, but measuring this can give incredible insight into how customer behaviour impacts on sales. “Technologies need to capture conversations happening on social networks and online communities, and correlate their impact with key business metrics such as revenue and brand value,” says Simon Morris, marketing director at Adobe Systems. “It is also important to directly measure the interactions businesses have with their customers in social media – for example how Facebook posts drive site visitors and purchase behaviour – so they can understand how effective certain channels and activities are for their brand, and where they should focus time and investment.”
3. Amplification
“Amplification is a measure of how often your messages are retweeted, liked or shared. It is important to consider as it will show how well your messages are being ‘amplified’ around the social web,” says Levine. Measuring amplification rates can give great insight into whether your messages on the social web contain the right content and are being targeted correctly. “If people are not sharing your information, it might not be targeted enough or too sales orientated,” adds Levine.
When you ping a message out to your social audience – it’s not just the 1000 (for example) Twitter followers you have that are, strictly, the audience. If your message is bang on and is being retweeted, then your potential audience instantly increases exponentially. Therefore measuring your amplification rates and striving to improve on them can mean growing your audience capacity at an impressive rate.
4. Competitor analysis
Social media and its natural transparency gives brands access to competitor information like never before, and yet so many still overlook the treasure trove of data open to them in this way. “Competitor analysis using social media is absolutely possible, and absolutely critical,” says Jan Razeb, CEO of Socialbakers – a social media monitoring tool that specialises in gathering social media performance data across different industry verticals. It does this by mining data from Facebook’s open graph API and uses that data to create industry benchmarks – taking into account factors such as number of fans and dwell time spent on pages.
“We have, for example, a rank listing of the top 218 performing airlines on Facebook around the world,” says Razeb. “We rank and categorise them against both local and industry verticals – and can create data visualisations from that.” Socialbakers has also recently started monitoring Twitter statistics, analysing brand activity on there by numbers of followers, tweets and by peer index rating (a score that is a relative measure of a brand’s online authority).
“A common mistake brands make is to not benchmark themselves against competitors but if you don’t, then how do you know how you are faring?” asks Richard Pentin, group planning director at digital agency TMW. Pentin suggests one of the reasons brands don’t benchmark is because there is no industry standard when it comes to measuring – and benchmarking success of – social media activity.
You’ll want to compare your brand against your competitors’ based on all of the metrics mentioned in this article but probably also identify very specific metrics to measure against depending on the types of online space in which you and your rivals operate. For example, if you constantly find the name of your competitor’s CEO popping up on influential industry blogs, you might want to think specifically about how you can hone your marketing strategy in order to do the same (or better).
Social media for lead nurturing
Social media is commonly considered to be more of an awareness generator than it is a lead generator, but as potential customers spend an increasing amount of time interacting on social networks, this perception is changing. Where once a brand might identify and focus on one effective social media channel to build awareness, now they should be thinking about joining up everything they do – whether that be on LinkedIn, Twitter or their blog, to eventually lead prospects back to their own website. For example – a LinkedIn profile page might lead a prospect to look at, and then regularly read a blog, which in time may convert to a business interaction.
Making metrics work for you
Once you know what metrics to measure, you then need to know your social media audience, says Dean Browell, PhD, vice president of Feedback
The number of subscribers to an email newsletter is not unlike the number of ‘likes’ on Facebook (effectively ‘subscribing’ to your posts); and those who reply to your brand’s account by name on Twitter are not unlike those who comment. When brands begin to categorise these activities they will be able to see very clear levels of stratification:
- Views – including subscribers and those who have not subscribed.
- Subscribers – those who have asked to be given information regularly.
- Approvers – those who ‘like’ or add ‘favourite’ (the lowest form of interaction).
- Engagers – those who seek interaction with the brand, including reactions.
- Reactors – those who provide content in reaction to brand content.
- Repeaters – those who share, retweet, repeat (with or without any editing).
- Validators – those who share or retweet with accompanying approving comment.
