How do I measure my Social Media influence/reach/engagement?

Ever so often, we hear this query raised by our clients and partners. As brands divert their focus to online marketing and consequently their budgets, there is a need to seek a more quantifiable manner of measuring the ROI of their activities on the social media platform. There are various metrics on our existing platform to aid in such analysis, but in response to feedback, we have decided to carve out an entire new section in our Digital Conversation Management System version 2.5.

The new system features six main new components:

1) Social Media Metrics:

2) Chart sampling feature – ability to toggle between rechecked conversations and the entire data set to generate quantitative and qualitative charts

3) Account Statistical Profiling:

4) Enhanced Social Media Equity Charts – allowing tracking of Social Media Equity (a 4d chart measuring buzz, sentiment, influence) over time and across subjects

5) Conversation Trends – provision of buzz trends within a single conversation thread

6) Bookmarking – enabling users to tag individual posts for easy follow-up and data export

Menus have also been reorganised into intuitive sections to facilitate navigation and extraction of vital data required – namely Trends, Insights, Channels, Influencers and Social Media Equity. In addition, an FAQ section and tooltips have been added to explain the various data sections.

Enhanced Metrics for ROI measurement and strategic business planning

1.Social Media Metrics

The various social media metrics newly introduced in our system enables brand managers to grasp an overview of all subjects being monitored (be it their brand, competing brands or their various product lines) in the social media space and discover market leaders and laggards.

a) Engagement (0%-100%)

The engagement metric quantifies the content creation and response level of a particular subject. The number of conversations unilaterally initiated, as well as the number of relevant comments and responses are taken into account in determining their relative engagement as compared to other subjects in the entire category. Thus, a brand that pushes out boring articles methodically without garnering responses will fare very poorly on the engagement front. Likewise for a brand that has low activity levels and relies on spill-over buzz from other articles which primary focus is not on them.

b) Influence (0-100)

Conversations by key opinion leaders online or what we term as influencers are gauged on their influence level. Their influence score is derived based on various parameters such as the total number of posts made and replies to their posts. The median of all influencers discussing a particular subject is then presented as the influence of that subject.

The higher the influence score, the more powerful the conversations relating to a particular subject is in terms of generating comments and consequently readership levels.

c) Reach (0%-100%)

The voice of a brand may be concentrated within a few key sites or virally discussed across various influential channels online. When measuring reach, we look at how deep and wide the conversations relating to a particular subject ‘travel’ among influential channels online. A high reach score indicate the ability of a subject to spread related conversations far and wide.

d) Sentiment Index for the Subject (-100%-100%)

Sentiment index looks at the average net sentiment score of all conversations within the subject. This index denotes whether the average sentiment of all buzz relating to a subject is more positive or more negative.

New Charting Features for Data Accuracy

2) Chart sampling feature – ability to toggle between rechecked conversations and the entire data set to generate quantitative and qualitative charts

By having trained social media analysts re-check the automated analysis performed by our technology, Brandtology ensures an exceptionally high accuracy and relevancy level of the data set provided to our clients. However, when doing an industry wide scan of conversations on competing products and other potential interest areas, clients typically only need an overview of the share of voice of their brands. Hence, the sampling feature allows the clients to see the share of voice clearly.

Nevertheless, to differentiate between the automatically rated sentiments & buzz charts and buzz of rechecked conversations, especially for generating visual charts, we have added a feature to allow users to toggle between these 2 data sets.

Statistical Profiling of Conversations for Deeper Insights

3) Account Statistical Profiling

The new account profile section gives a quick statistical overview snapshot of all subjects being monitored in terms of a) Buzz & Sentiments, b) Conversations and Voices and c) Channels.

a) Buzz & Sentiments

This table gives a summary of the total buzz for each subject, as well as the breakdown in sentiment for each subject. The numerical statistics are also colour coded, thus allowing you to quickly identify weaknesses or strengths of all subjects monitored in terms of buzz and sentiments.

b) Conversations and Voices

This Conversation and Voices table provides a summary of the new conversations, comments, as well as active voices engaging in a given subject.

This is particularly useful for identifying popular conversations which are garnering a lot of comments/replies, as well as identifying the number of netizens contributing to the buzz. Interestingly, this would also enable clients to quickly detect ‘hot topics with numerous comments/replies but actually fuelled by a very small group of netizens. Such abnormalities would be easily picked up from this table.

c) Channels

The Channels table shows the total number of channels where conversations are taking place about each subject and further categorises them by channel type. This would help clients to identify dominant channel types for each subject and better plan their engagement/advertising efforts.

Tracking of Social Media Equity over time for brand and campaign measurement

4) Enhanced Social Media Equity Charts –allowing tracking of Social Media Equity (a 4d chart measuring buzz, sentiment, influence) over time and across subjects

The Social Media Equity chart is a 4-dimensional chart that plots the position of a specific product or service in relation to other competing brands or other products/services within the same brand.

This bubble chart is based on 4 factors – Average Sentiment, Average Influence, Buzz Share and Time. The x- and y-axes represent the average sentiment and influence respectively, with the size of the bubble indicating relative buzz share. The time factor can be adjusted to show the movement of individual bubbles along the chart over a specified time period.

The Social Media Equity chart helps to gauge relative position not just amongst competitors but also amongst a brand’s stable of products and services. This is especially useful for product development departments to track the performance of various products.

In this latest release of our DCMS, the Social Media Equity charts allow brands to track the performance of various subjects over time. In particular, this would be useful to track performance before a campaign, during a campaign and after a campaign to see if a campaign has resulted in a positive and sustained effect on a brand’s social media equity.

Deeper Conversation Thread Analysis

5) Conversation Trends – provision of buzz trends within a single conversation thread

The ability to track the buzz trends of a particular conversation thread is also a new feature in the system. This allows brands to closely monitor hotly debated threads to see how the buzz unfolds. For positive seeded word-of-mouth, a long-tail effect is ideal but for negative brand conversations, it best to observe a decline in buzz after a few days.

Bookmarking of Posts for Workflow Management and Efficient Follow-up

6) Bookmarking – enabling users to tag individual posts for easy follow-up and data export

For clients and partners who are more hands-on, a new bookmarking feature will allow them to bookmark selected posts for collation into a list for further analysis or export. This will facilitate research on specific conversation topics, or aid them in shortlisting posts which require further follow-up actions.

Try out the new DCMS v.2.5

If you are keen to see a demo session of our new DCMS, please do not hesitate to contact us via contact@brandtology.com