There’s a strong sense that businesses of every size and kind should harness social media, yet there’s no agreed approach on how it should be measured. To some extent this is because social media is still a novelty for many companies. Yet every business leader needs to justify how time and resources are spent.
However you decide to measure your footprint, in order to uncover valuable insight it’s important to combine the power of measurement tools with the flexibility of human judgment.
It’s crucial to put measurement front of mind from the very outset and have a clear objective ahead of starting the analysis. These ten tips will help you on your way:
1. Get the search terms right
It will save a lot of time and effort if you get the search terms right from the start. If your company name is a common term, consider how you can refine the search to minimize irrelevant mentions. Be careful you’re not so restrictive you exclude on-topic posts though. It’s better to be slightly too broad and remove the irrelevant mentions later than to miss some key discussion around your brand.
It’s also critical to understand that what you search for will frame what you subsequently discover. So, searching for ‘battery’ in connection with the iPhone will inevitably suggest battery life is a problem. Compare the volume and sentiment of these mentions to other handsets, as well as examining what percentage of all iPhone conversations they comprise. This will provide some much-needed context.
2. Clean up the data
SEO professionals take on Google by getting content to appear more prominently in search rankings. There’s no one easy way to clean up a data set, other than to download it as an Excel spreadsheet and get your hands dirty. Removing spammy words and phrases is one useful starting point.
If you want to examine what your customers are saying about your brand, you may also want to remove all headline news-sharing without comment. This will enable you to focus more closely on organic conversations. If the volumes around your brand are high enough, you may gain further value from focusing on a few key sites.
3. Automated analysis can be very misleading
In the long-run investing the time in downloading all the mentions of your brand into a spreadsheet, sampling the data (using Excel’s random formula) and coding, for example, 400 mentions for sentiment on a regular basis will be of more value than relying on automated analysis. The same applies to any type of qualitative analysis you want to do.
4. Measure what matters
The number of likes you have on Facebook tells you how many people have clicked the like button on one site, on one page, and nothing else. Superficial numbers provide a superficial understanding. While having more Facebook likes than your competitor may be indicative of popularity, it isn’t a direct measure of it. The danger of measuring something simply because it’s easy to measure is that you mistake the answer you get for the answer to a different question.
5. Don’t ignore your competitors
Last month, your company was mentioned 10,000 times in social media and 67% of the discussion was positive – so what? The volume, sentiment and even the topic of social media conversations need to be understood in context. Examining and comparing yourself with your competitors is one of the most effective ways to do this.
6. Correlation does not imply causation
It’s all too easy, particularly in hindsight, to look at an increase in positive sentiment towards a company and a rise in the share price and assume the former has caused the latter. However, it’s unlikely to be a cause-and-effect relationship whereby social is shaping the value of the stock. In this instance, a more likely explanation is that more positive news is being shared which is mirrored in the share price rise. Illogically inferring reverse causation from correlation is a frequent mistake amongst social media measurement practitioners.
7. Don’t limit yourself to brand mentions
Social media research offers the opportunity to do far more than merely examine attitudes and perceptions towards specific brands. Think about the conversations your customers are having about things relating to what you do and the products and services you offer, and what you could learn from listening in.
8. Be measured in your conclusions
The press frequently latch ‘Twitter storm’ onto an event and there’s a tendency to overestimate the impact of a negative flurry of activity within social media. If you look at the Waitrose hashtag ‘fail’, in which the Twitter community ridiculed the supermarket for its middle-class associations through the company’s #WaitroseReasons hashtag, all it really did was cement the brand’s core values among its target market.
9. Influence isn’t everything
The more we use social media, the more it creeps into our consciousness and unwittingly impacts the decisions we make. That’s why, from a measurement perspective, it’s important to not only think of a post on social media merely in terms of how many people it has reached, and what evidence we can find as to how it has impacted others, but to see it as a direct record of an experience in itself.
10. Context is key
All conversations on social media take place in a specific context. This can be particular to the site, such as the tendency for tweets to be more polarized when expressing an opinion, compared to more balanced longer-form posts on blogs. Or it could result from the way in which a brand is mentioned: a customer services account on Twitter will invariably attract more negative mentions. It’s important to recognize the fact that many sites also attract a particular demographic and many people do present a more aspirational side of themselves on social media. Any analysis you do and any findings you subsequently draw must be interpreted and understood in context.
