SOCIAL MEDIA MONITORING & MEASUREMENT

Mark Farmer, Ryerson University Feb 12, 2014

Glorious Me

You

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Tonight

What are social media monitoring & measurement?

Best practices Platforms

Strengths & weaknessesApplications

How to implement monitoring & measurement

Why measure?

Focus and clarity. Since they’re objective and empirical, they remove opinion and conjecture from the decision-making process.

Legitimacy.If you want social media to be taken seriously in your institution, you will need it legitimized.

Why measure?

Demonstrating success. Nothing motivates like a success story, and you’ll need to motivate people to adopt social media.

Clarity for yourself. How can you evangelize something to others if you yourself can’t tell whether or not it’s a success?

ROI

Return on investment != “Return on engagement” (Gain from investment - cost of

investment) / cost of investment In other words, you want to get out more

then you spend

Myths

It’s immeasurable You shouldn’t measure You need to find the dollars ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) equivalent

is what matters

How to measure

Define resultsIs the desired result something tangible, like

more revenue, more sign-ups for a newsletter, something empirical like that? That’s fairly direct to measure, but can be difficult to track back to social efforts. There’s a few things you can do, however.

How to measure

Define results○ Shortened links in your promotions and

campaigns: because they’re unique, you can use them to track referral traffic to your website.

○ Special offers promoted online: allow you to measure pickup.

○ 30-day cookies.○ Or just ask, using a survey or questionnaire:

How did you hear about us?What was the most important part of your purchase

decision?

How to measure

Less tangible?Increased reputation? If so, how will you

measure that?Probably through a proxy, like sentiment.If sentiment goes up, assumedly so does

reputation.

How to measure

The perils of tangibilityBe careful: measuring things like sentiment

online is fraught with danger. A lot of companies with very expensive

products will claim to monitor sentiment automatically.

Their output is uniformly dubious if they’re not using a natural language processing engine.

Luckily, you can manually find out sentiment: it just takes longer.

How to measure

Maybe it can be measured directly in social media:LikesRetweetsComments

Trivia

Change over time

Popular metrics such as Facebook likes or Twitter followers aren’t critical in and of themselves.

What’s more valuable is positive change over time in such metrics; this shows that your digital media are headed in the right direction

What’s important

Other metrics, such as engagement rate, are more significant in and of themselves because they show the deeper interactions which are of the most value to your organization.

Uh oh

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag

Share, share, share

What do you measure

ReachHow far does our message travel?

What do you measure

EngagementHow much does our audience engage with us, and how often? How much do they share, comment on, or like our content?

What do you measure

SentimentIs our audience saying positive or negative things about the institution? How negative or positive is the overall tone?

What do you measure

InfluenceAre we influencing our audience to take actions? Are we reaching key influencers?

Reach

Facebook Total reachImpressions

InstagramFollowers

LinkedInFollowers

Reach

TwitterFollowers

YouTubeViewsMinutes watched

Traffic and interactions on websites and blogs driven by social

Engagement

FacebookEngagement rateTotal number of engaged usersNumber of ‘stories’ created by users (i.e.

number of interactions)Page likes / post likesClicks

InstagramLikes

Engagement

LinkedInLikesComments

TwitterFavouritesRetweetsClicks (ow.ly / bit.ly)

Engagement

YouTubeLikesFavouritesSharesSubscribers

Influence

Number of mentions by top influencers, as identified by Radian 6 / Sysomos Heartbeat

Sentiment

Net sentiment change in Radian6, Sysomos Heartbeat

Benchmark

1. Previous effort

2. The competition

3. Phone-a-friend

4. Going forward

Challenges

Many of the metrics listed above depend on a variety of inputs. Because of this, digital media practitioners shouldn’t be held solely responsible for moving these metrics; such metrics are impacted by many different inputs above and beyond the digital media channels available to an institution.

The good news

You can start measuring the results of your efforts right now, without spending a dime, using native or freemium dashboards.

Listening

Passive ListeningThe most basic level. There is no interaction

at this level, just listening.

Listening

Active ListeningTakes passive listening further by interacting

with audience members online. This can be as simple as acknowledging a question, commenting on a conversation, or liking a comment.

This helps personalize digital media, and demonstrates that you’re active and responsive.

Active listening can help you learn about customers, their concerns and perceptions.

Listening

Social CareSocial care takes listening to the next level

by using social channels as a way to deliver customer service, responding to complaints and concerns, fielding requests and so on.

As people see an organization respond to customer care issues online, they become more likely to use these channels for customer care themselves. This may shift more customer care online from traditional channels.

Tools – Enterprise dashboards

Salesforce: Radian6 Sysomos: Heartbeat Meltwater uberVU

Tools – Native dashboards Facebook LinkedIn Twitter YouTube Instagram (Statigram)

Paid platform-specific dashboards

Hashtracking Tweetreach Tailwind EdgeRank Checker

Freemium dashboard

HootSuite

Multi-platform paid dashboard

SproutSocial

Not getting into

Google Analytics / Adobe Site Catalyst

Your new best friend

Excel Pivot charts

Selling it to the C Suite – don’t

How do we turn this into money?You don’t - it’s part of a marketing funnel“You set ‘em up - we knock ‘em down”

Change over time Sentiment - proxy Social care Social CRM

Value

http://www.smartinsights.com/social-media-marketing/facebook-marketing/what-is-the-value-of-a-facebook-fan-a-case-study/

Porblems

Twitter reach:http://www.unmarketing.com/2012/04/15/wh

en-we-exaggerate-our-size-everyone-loses/

Learn what works for you Try something. If it works, do more of it. If it doesn’t, do less of it. Rinse, repeat.

Resources

Olivier Blanchard - Social Media ROI: http://www.amazon.ca/dp/0789747413

Beth Kanter - Measuring the Networked Non-Profit: http://www.amazon.ca/Measuring-Networked-Nonprofit-Using-Change/dp/1118137604

Katie Delahaye Paine - Measuring What Matters: http://www.amazon.ca/Measure-What-Matters-Understanding-Relationships/dp/B00D821V28

Avinash Kauishik – Web Analytics 2.0: http://www.amazon.ca/Web-Analytics-2-0-Accountability-Centricity/dp/0470529393

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Appenidx 1: the funnel