How do you prioritise social media metrics?
A key part in creating a social media strategy is to ensure that you have a coherent set of measures that align with that strategy. But how do you prioritise the multitude of measures that are available to you?
Which is more valuable – a Facebook “like” or a twitter follower? This article seeks to set out why and how you can go about defining this for your own brands.
Much has been written and debated about setting appropriate key performance indicators for social media, and rightly so. More than ever, as spend is rapidly being diverted into supporting a business or brand’s social engagement, it is essential that appropriate metrics are agreed in advance to ensure that this social investment delivers the necessary returns.
We have co-authored the IAB approach to measuring social media, that sets out to ensure your objectives for social media engagement are aligned with your broader business objectives.
The complexity, of course, comes when you begin to get into exactly how you will be engaging in social spaces. As you get into the detailed planning, you will appreciate more and more that social is not a channel at all, but more an approach to communications that can permeate all your traditional communications channels.
Setting aside this greater puzzle for the moment, of how to begin to incorporate a coherent social strategy into your broader communications channels, let’s just focus on how to go about setting appropriate measures and targets for what can be explicitly termed social channels.
Here, I am referring principally to engagement spaces covering social connections such as Facebook and Linkedin, blogging and microblogging spaces such as Twitter, location based interaction such as Foursquare and Scvngr and subject-based discussion forums like Mumsnet and Pistonheads.
As you explore each area, it is feasible to begin to set metrics and targets for each of these areas in turn.
For example:
Social connections
The goal for the brand is likely to involve building a network of fans and then engaging them with interesting content and conversation over time, so some fairly simple metrics here seem appropriate, such as number of connections and engagement rate. This should ensure that you have a balanced approach to acquiring connections and then building them into advocates. In more advanced cases, you may even be able to ascribe a monetary value to a Facebook “like”, as we have been able to do for Unilever’s Lynx brand, and this can be used to directly drive the social media business case.
Microblogging and blogging
What can start off as a social tool to increase the reach of corporate PR will quickly evolve into a conversation channel. Simple metrics will involve the number of followers/subscribers, level of engagement and reach.
Reach can be calculated using tools such as , or authority tools, such as Klout or Peerindex.
Location based engagement
Driven by mobile, location based engagement will potentially lead to interaction with brands in the physical world, and should not be restricted to being considered simply as an opportunity for retail brand discussion forums. Engaging in conversations with audiences who are interested in the product area is potentially a winning strategy, while forcing yourself into conversations where the brand is at best tangential is unlikely to deliver short or long term value.
Setting a coherent set of metrics and targets is hard enough, but a critical step in setting the social strategy and then appropriate measures to assess how well it’s being realised is to understand the relative value of each of those targets.
Which is worth more – a Facebook “like” or a Twitter follower? A comment on your own blog, or your comment on another’s blog?
Most of these are incredibly difficult to allocate a specific value to unless backed up by some serious research.
However, giving some significant thought to what each type of interaction means is going to be critical if you are going to create a social strategy that will genuinely add value to the business.
For the sake of starting an argument, I will set out my own league table of the potential value of different types of social engagement, based on a theoretical FMCG brand, with an existing “operational” level of social media engagement, from most to least valuable:
Starting your own list of the relative value of each type of social interaction will certainly lead to a really valuable and important conversation as you will have to validate your findings against your own social strategy and success metrics.
Over time, we will progress towards ascribing an absolute value to each of the interactions set out above, but in the meantime, it is a great way of evaluating how well your social strategy is aligned to your social efforts.
The research, based on a survey of more than 800 companies, benchmarks budgets, resourcing, measurement and barriers to success … plus much more.
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