There are now more social media measurement tools available as social media channels become increasingly critical for business to understand then learn how to maximise its potential. Listening is a massive element of this where monitoring tools are essential.
However, a deeper understanding is required here. Brands and agencies need to agree on how to be able to locate, analyse and act upon activity with informed and intelligent decisions. The rapid rate of social media growth and the need to demonstrate the return on investment (ROI) into a channel that is evolving can sometimes have brands and agencies pulling against each other instead of together in the same direction.
I have had many, many conversations over the years with colleagues and clients about social media measurement tools. Back in 2006, when the first tools started to make more of an appearance they were not only exorbitantly expensive, they couldn’t do everything they said on the tin and required a huge amount of manual work (number crunching, sourcing sites and determining sentiment).
The brands that were bold enough to invest in social media in those days paid (and paid heavily) for the development of better, more intelligent measurement software. To give you an example, in 2006 one such tool charged €230,000 USD set up fee, with a monthly maintenance / management fee of €80,000 per month. It even didn’t work properly, with vast exaggeration on what the service could actually do.
Measurement tools today are much slicker, more cost effective and can offer real and valuable insight. Playing the devils advocate though, they really don’t deliver anything that, given enough time (and lots of it) and resources, a savvy marketer could source and analyse themselves. I have to stress though, I am not suggesting for a minute that budgets are pulled from measurement tools or avoided altogether. A good tool can enable you to engage more effectively in real time with customers, supporters and influencers and can be worth their weight in gold, particularly during crisis comms.
What I am saying though, is that marketers can be quite blinkered when it comes to measuring ROI and campaign performances. There’s a lot of hype that’s been bought into when it comes to social media measurement tools. When every penny spent has to be justified to the board of Trustees, members and donors, learning how to measure your digital activity in-house can not only save on the cost of a third party tool, it can also help demonstrate the value in digital marketing and social media. You can learn huge amounts just by some crude number crunching and savvy searching by yourself.
Let’s look at Twitter as an example. Facebook has it’s own Insights which you can learn a lot from, and they have just this week introduced even more features for richer insights which I’ll touch on below.
If you are running a campaign that say, goes for 72 hours, just prior to the campaign launch you could take snapshot of the number of Likes, Twitter followers and number of @mentions and retweets (RTs) over the last day. In 24 hours, do the same thing. Do it again for day two and again at the end of the campaign on day three (and because things don’t just shut off on the internet, continue on for a few days afterwards). For both followers, @mentions and RTs, substract the first total from the second, the second from the third, the third from the fourth and so on. This will enable you to (crudely) see just how the campaign was received on a daily basis. From that, you could look at activities and communications around the highest and lowest days to determine what was different and what worked well and not so well.
You can also subtract the first day totals from the last day to get the overall figures. Going further than that, you can take a quick look at the profiles of some your Twitter followers, add them up, divide it and get an average. From there, you can learn how many directly engaged with the charity (on Twitter only of course) during the campaign and how many people that potentially reached due to the organic word of mouth nature of social media.
A few weeks ago, Facebook rather quietly started publishing something called, ‘talking about this’ on Pages. Visible to everyone, ‘talking about this’ is basically the direct interactions / engagement level on a Page, so the number of comments, Likes on a post, responses to an Event, or Shares of a post and so on. It’s not updated in real-time as yet (seems to be a 24 hour update), but is so far proving to be a really interesting feature from a marketer’s perspective.
Last week, the way of establishing the potential reach of a Facebook campaign, would have been by applying the same metrics as described above for Twitter. This week however, Facebook have unveiled new features for Insights that allow you to gather even richer, deeper data on how this channel is performing. As well as seeing the ‘People talking about this’ you can now see the total number of friends your fans have, as well as your total reach over a week at a time. These two metrics are now graphed alongside the number of times Posts you do, so you can see how this correlates with the engagement and virility of your efforts.
~Business Game Changer Special Promotion~
Rachel Hawkes
This is a sample chapter taken from the book Insiders Know-How: Public Relations. Pick up your copy from Amazon
