Measuring success in social media

MBA 563WEEK 4

What this class will cover….

• Social listening / monitoring• Challenges and opportunities for marketers in

social media• Measuring success in social media

SOCIAL “LISTENING”

So how do we manage real-time social media?

• Social Listening– Set up alerts and searches for mentions of your

brand and competitor’s brands and analyze for “voice and reach”

– Sentiment analysis

Don’t be caught by surprise...

• The story of the 9 year old and her food blog (first 1.5 minutes of Clay Shirky at TED 2012)

• “This brings up the question what made them think they could get away with something like that?” (Clay Shirky)

• They obviously hadn’t realized that they had to listen.....

What is “social listening”

• “..using technology to assemble a collection of keyword-based searches online that help you locate mentions and instances of those keywords on the web”

• Mentions of:– Your brand / product / service / organization– The competition– Industry discussion

The Now Revolution. Baer & Naslund. Wiley. 2011

Passive versus active listening

• Passive listening is a diagnostic exercise, an ear-to-the-ground– Are people talking?– What are they saying?– Where are they saying it?

• Active listening includes that constant monitoring but also includes response and engagement

The Now Revolution. Baer & Naslund. Wiley. 2011

How does social listening impact a business?

• Sales – listening for expressed need (people often ask for recommendations on social media, so offer information and assistance).

• Marketing & PR – listening helps you learn the language of your customers

• Customer service – if you are listening you can respond fast (and via the medium where your customers are)

• Research and development – the “wish they had” search

The Now Revolution. Baer & Naslund. Wiley. 2011

Listening models

The Now Revolution. Baer & Naslund. Wiley. 2011

Level 1

Level 2

Level 3

Software tools for listening• As needed alerts – the simplest way

• Free social media monitoring software

• Paid social media monitoring software

The Now Revolution. Baer & Naslund. Wiley. 2011

As-needed alerts• For use when brand / name / product mentions are relatively

rare• Set up Google Alerts to create a “push” notification whenever

your keywords are mentioned (automatically emailed to you)• Free service• As many alerts as you like • You need to be careful about crafting your alert (either too

little or too few results) – so be really specific• Not real-time – delay between mention and alert can be as

long as 24 hours• Alerts arrive individually, so harder to analyze

The Now Revolution. Baer & Naslund. Wiley. 2011

Free social media monitoring software• There are quite a few to choose from, and you

will probably need to use more than one to get good coverage

• Hootsuite (free and paid versions) http://blog.hootsuite.com/social-listening-hsu-videos-2/

• SocialMention • Twitter advanced search• Addictomatic• IceRocket (social specific search engine)

The Now Revolution. Baer & Naslund. Wiley. 2011

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 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 metrics on 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 / metrics software

• Fully featured dashboards, analytics, reports, social listening (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)– Hootsuite Pro (limited free version available)– WebTrends– Adobe Social