Measuring success in social media

MARK 430

What this class will cover….

• Facebook basics• Challenges and opportunities for marketers in

social media• Measuring success in social media

FACEBOOK

Facebook

• 10 years old – became a public company in 2012• At the end of Q1, April 2014

– 1.28 billion active users (log in once a month or more)– 802 million daily users (609 million of them on mobile)– Over 1 million advertisers– Advertising revenues for the full year 2013 - $7.87

billion• Over 50% coming from mobile advertising

So, what is a marketer to do?

• Marketers use Facebook for owned, earned, and paid media because….

• “Familiarity breeds acceptance.” Vaynerchuck

• “Hard to dismiss a platform as skewing too young, or too experimental, or too trendy, when your niece, your brother, your seventy-two-year-old dad…are on it” Vaynerchuck

Paradoxically, it is the size of the platform that causes the problem for marketers

• With that massive amount of content streaming into a users Newsfeed, it is almost impossible to get and keep attention.

• Marketers need to understand how Facebook manages the Newsfeed algorithm, called Edgerank– Video from Annalise Kaylor “Mastering Facebook

Edgerank” (29 minutes)

The Edgerank algorithm tweaked to reduce organic reach

• Analysis of more than 100 brand pages - organic reach was around 6 percent, a decline of 49 percent from October 2013

• For large pages with more than 500,000 Likes, organic reach hit 2 percent in February 2014

• “Organic reach of the content brands publish in Facebook is destined to hit zero. It’s only a matter of time.”

• Marketers being pushed to paid media

http://social.ogilvy.com/facebook-zero-considering-life-after-the-demise-of-organic-reach/

Other significant Edgerank changes aimed at reducing spam

• “Likebaiting” – asking “News Feed readers to like, comment, or share the post in order to get additional distribution beyond what the post would normally receive” is now being targeted

• Frequently circulated content (ie. Reposting of memes etc)

• Spammy links (deceptively phrased)• Facebook is encouraging authentic conversation

and relationship building not begging or bribing fans

http://edgerankchecker.com/blog/2014/04/update-to-algorithm-reducing-spam/

Facebook marketing products

• Facebook for business• Build a page, not a personal account• Facebook advertising products

– Sponsored stories problem • Boosted posts (also called Promoted Posts)

Facebook metrics• Earned media – engagement metrics (we will

look in a bit more detail at these later on)• Facebook business products for measuring

success with Pages and their advertising products– Page Insights– Ads Manager– Conversion tracking

SOCIAL MEDIA: CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES FOR MARKETERS

Common pitfalls of using social media• Firms need to follow consumers across different networks to create

consistent and persistent messaging• Needs a structured approach with formal training and planning • It might be difficult to control

– Serious backlash is possible eg. #McDStories on twitter• Content offered freely in social media should be of genuine value

to others in the community• Eg. Answering questions in forums, or in professional spaces without

overt “marketing”

• Get to know the community first – think about your “profile” and reputation

• Overt selling doesn’t work• Privacy concerns and the merging of the public and private spheres

• Is privacy dead? (as Mark Zuckerberg says)

Managing negativity in social media

• Your brand is getting a lot of very negative comments on its Facebook page– Some are in very strong and derogatory language – Some use “hate” language (eg. racial, ethnic, or

gender slurs) to make personal attacks on key staff members by name

– Some use four-letter swear words– Some are just simply bad-mouthing your brand in

a way that involves false information• Should you delete them?

Managing negative comments in social media

• To delete or not to delete? Should brands censor comments?• Drawing the line between negative and unacceptable comme

nts• Managing the public relations aspect of having a blog

– Particularly challenging for a public agency– US Air Force Blog Assessment Flowchart (don’t feed the trolls..)

• The Retail Consumer Report (RightNow): Bring back unhappy customers via social media

MEASURING SUCCESS IN SOCIAL MEDIA

Marketing return on investment

• Any marketing activity costs money– Either as a direct expense

• Paid media – eg advertising expense• Owned media – eg. Payments to an outside agency for

setting up and managing a web presence or social media presence

– Or an indirect expense – eg. Labour costs for employees who are managing earned media activities by engaging in social listening and engaging with people on social media

Indicators of success in owned and earned social media

• The main measures that we will look at and use:– Mentions– Sentiment– Reach and exposure– Engagement

• Additional indicators that marketers should use:– Share of voice– Audience growth rate– Influence

Tracking MENTIONS

• The first (and probably the easiest) social media metric to track is VOLUME of mentions– ie. Judging the size of a conversation by counting mentions– so you will monitor “mentions” of your brand, company,

product or service, industry, competitors, etc– These can be specific eg. A direct @username mention on

Twitter– Or just the inclusion of your brand name in a Facebook

post• Is there are hierarchy of value to these mentions?• If so, what is it?The Beginners Guide to Social Media Metrics (White Paper). Hootsuite. 2014

How to use MENTIONS• Absolute numbers not as important as trends

and spike• Measure direct and indirect mentions

consistently• Establish a baseline

– Track different types of mentions in recurring time periods (daily, weekly, etc) to establish the typical volume.

– Record benchmarks so you can accurately measure growth over time.

The Beginners Guide to Social Media Metrics (White Paper). Hootsuite. 2014

What is SENTIMENT?

• Sentiment is the emotion behind a social media mention

• A way to (attempt) to measure the whether a person is happy, unhappy, irritated etc

• Mentions alone are not enough – you need to know if they are positive, negative, or neutral

The Beginners Guide to Social Media Metrics (White Paper). Hootsuite. 2014

How do you measure SENTIMENT?• It is very difficult to do at scale• Requires either lots and lots of time - read all

of those mentions and decide what the tone is, then assign a score

• OR• Use software that provides sophisticated

techniques for analyzing words and imputing meaning – based on machine learning

The Beginners Guide to Social Media Metrics (White Paper). Hootsuite. 2014

What does REACH mean?

• Both relate to measuring the SIZE of your audience• REACH is the potential audience for a message

based on total follower count across all social channels

• Facebook defines reach as “the number of people who saw your post” – ie. When it appears in their News Feed (remember this is not organic on FB)

• How would this be different on Twitter or Pinterest?

The Beginners Guide to Social Media Metrics (White Paper). Hootsuite. 2014

What does EXPOSURE mean?

• EXPOSURE takes the concept of reach further.• It measures the potential audience not just the

number of followers you have, but also the number of followers each of your followers has.

• If your tweet was retweeted by a Twitter user with 10,000 followers– exposure for that tweet = the number of impressions

(views) based on your audience plus the 10,000 impressions based on that specific user’s audience

The Beginners Guide to Social Media Metrics (White Paper). Hootsuite. 2014

For earned media focus on ENGAGEMENT metrics

• Engagement metrics measure audience ACTION (more than just seeing a post)

• How much and how often does your audience interact with your social media content

• Likes, comments, retweets, favourites, repins etc – these all indicate engagement (but of varying VALUE)

• Sharing metrics can be separately identified, because they are also used to measure EXPOSURE

The Beginners Guide to Social Media Metrics (White Paper). Hootsuite. 2014

Each SM platform has different engagement metrics which will all be measured differently

The Beginners Guide to Social Media Metrics (White Paper). Hootsuite. 2014

How to use engagement metrics• Measure growth and performance on specific social

networks. – Track your engagement rate over time to see how you’re

improving.• Guide your content strategy.

– understand what types of content or posts get the most attention – and which ones the least

• Target the right demographic. – Look at the gender, age or location of the people

engaged (Facebook Insights provides this breakdown or you could manually investigate). Does this fit with your TARGET demographic?

The Beginners Guide to Social Media Metrics (White Paper). Hootsuite. 2014

How to use engagement metrics (cont’d)

• Measure the success of product launches, marketing campaigns or other new initiatives. – Listen to feedback and comments to improve future projects.

• Add context to exposure or reach– Count sharing metrics like retweets or replies and divide them by

exposure or reach to calculate an engagement percentage. – This will tell you what percentage of your potential audience actively

participated in a contest, read a blog post, etc.• Find influencers or brand advocates.

– If there are people who consistently engage with you in social, consider utilizing them to help gain more exposure for future initiatives.

• Example of some metrics from the Twitter Activity Dashboard for tracking earned mediaThe Beginners Guide to Social Media Metrics (White Paper). Hootsuite. 2014

SOFTWARE FOR MANAGING AND MEASURING SOCIAL MEDIA

Metrics provided by social networks themselves

• Facebook business products for measuring success with Pages and their advertising products– Page Insights– Ads Manager– Conversion tracking

• Twitter Analytics for their advertising products• Twitter Activity Dashboard for tracking earned media• Pinterest Analytics• YouTube Analytics: what we can measure about the

use of video on YouTube

Free-ish software for managing multiple social channels

• Hootsuite (free versus paid version – scroll down for pricing)• Buffer (free version versus paid - pricing information for

business version) (1.27m video)• Google Analytics – Social Reports (2m video)

• Hootsuite versus Buffer (written by Hootsuite!)

Paid social media monitoring software

• Fully featured dashboards, analytics, reports (aimed at the enterprise / large organizations)

• Can be used by teams / multiple clients• Integrated with other metrics from across all

marketing channels (eg. Web analytics, social network analytics, advertising metrics, etc)

• Examples:– Salesforce Marketing Cloud / Radian 6 (demos – registration

needed)– SLD Social Intelligence Solutions (was Alterian)– Hootsuite Pro (limited free version available)– WebTrends