Metrics in social media (translation of Avinash Koshik's article)
We have prepared a translation of Avinash Koshyk’s article on what and how to measure when working in social networks. We warn you right away: the translation is copyright and does not pretend to absolute accuracy. We will be grateful if you point out any errors or omissions noticed! The original can be found here: www.kaushik.net/avinash/best-social-media-metrics-conversation-amplification-applause-economic-value
One of my main rules is to write only about real problems and methods of measurement, which are also available offline. Now I am going to break this rule - or rather, its second part.
')
I want you to understand the general strategy by which you can take any measurements in SMM. In this case, you are unlikely to be able to easily apply my recommendations in practice.
Why am I doing this?
Social media is developing at an incredible pace. Most of us have no idea how to use this channel correctly. You go on Twitter, and the feeling that you are watching TV (and it breaks my heart). Every minute huge amounts of information are generated, and most of the popular metrics are not so important (I try to remain polite). We are thrown from one extreme to another: on the one hand, the barricades are “IT people”, who give out huge analytical reports (one report in 30 metrics, is it familiar?). On the other hand, enlightened marketers who measure success with highly dubious indicators (“I have 158,632 friends! Hooray!”).
From now on, I want you to use metrics that meet a single criterion: they must show whether you really use the most optimal channel.
To use only useful metrics and, on the basis of the data obtained, to correct one’s behavior in social media is a revolutionary approach, isn’t it?
Stop shaming your brand on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and YouTube. It's time to work with really dedicated followers / friends / subscribers!
So what is really important in social media?
Not the number of friends / followers / subscribers. Not the number of posts / tweets. Not the percentage of your followers and those you follow. And not ... yes, there are still many ridiculous options to offer!
Actually, what is important is what happens after all these posts / tweets / reposts!
Did you manage to get attention? Please? Make people share their impressions? Initiate a discussion? Did you set someone up to something? And it brought economic profit?
So, I propose four metrics that (and this is especially cool!) Can be used absolutely in any social media.
Intrigued? Then go ahead ...
When I say that most brands make television out of social networks, I mean that in social media we produce the same incoherent information flows, like those that stream on us from TV screens.
We do not know who is on the other side of the screen. And in order to reach these people, we try to declare ourselves as loudly and often as possible.
But you can do without it. In social media, we can quite easily determine who our follower / friend / subscriber is. We can find out if our messages reach him (almost in real time!). We must not forget that, unlike other channels, we are dealing with social media. And the word “social” includes, first of all, such concepts as “speak”, “listen” and “discuss”.
So why not measure it all?
Communication rate = number of audience comments (or responses) per publication.
Wonderful news: you can use this metric absolutely in any social media. In your blog. Twitter feed. Facebook Google+ YouTube.
A high rate of communication is possible only when you clearly understand who your audience is, what are the distinguishing features of your brand, what are you especially good at, and what benefits you can bring to your followers.
That's why I love this metric. She immediately makes you do the right thing. And this is a big job.
So, aim for a high rate of communication! Create your own watering hole in the digital universe. And keep only conscious communication with the audience. You can't buy it for marketing money.
Of course, to achieve a high rate of communication is easy and if you behave provocatively and post greasy jokes. But then, your company's shares will not grow a cent, will it?
Remember, we measure not in order to manipulate the results. We measure our business to grow.
Let's continue: the second magic metric ...
Each channel has limitations, most often expressed in the number of ads that you can buy. On Google (contextual advertising), on Facebook (ads), on radio (audio advertising), etc.
But social media has a huge advantage that you just have to use.
Not only do you have your own network, but each “node” in your network has its own network! If you follow my advice and publish "incredible, relevant, useful" in understanding your audience posts, you can go beyond your network and bring your messages to more users.
Take, for example, me. Today, I have 57 thousand followers on Twitter and about 12 thousand on Google+. That's all, the limit. Even if every follower of mine reads everything I write, I can reach no more than 57 thousand people on Twitter.
But the size of the “second level” network (followers of my followers) is 6.3 million people. And my real “coverage” is not 57 thousand, but neither more nor less than 6.3 million!
Measure the level of distribution - how actively your followers share your content with their network of contacts.
In Twitter:
Spread rate = number of retweets per tweet.
On Facebook, Google+:
Spread rate = number of posts per post.
In a personal blog, YouTube:
Spread rate = the number of rasters clicks per post (or video).
(Sharing clicks - clicks on buttons that allow sharing content on social networking pages).
Publish your posts and have fun! But do not forget to keep track of what type of messages causes a real resonance (allows you to spread to the second or even the third level of the network). Analyze the time of publication of such posts, their geographical location, topics, and so on.
And then just post more often this type of post. Then your content will be shared more often, and it will spread more. And most importantly: your visitors will receive the content that they simply can not share!
Over time, people from the second-level network will go to the first-level network. After all, it will become clear to them: you are burning!
Result: contact with the audience and coverage, which for money, well, really, you can not buy.
I do not know how easy it is to calculate all the channels at once. Fill each separately in Excel, see the picture above, and create magic!
And here we are greeted by the following metric.
I am sure that you saw through my malicious plan to make you really understand your audience (and not stupid to post in your cozy social networks).
Here you have another powerful, even more direct way - an indicator of approval.
In Twitter:
Approval rate = how many times your post was added to favorites
On Facebook:
Approval rate = number of likes per post
On Google+:
Approval rate = amount "+1" per post
In a blog post on YouTube:
Approval rate = number of "+1" and likes per post (video)
You just need to know what the public likes (if you use the terminology of Facebook) and what doesn't. So you start to better understand what your followers like so much that they shake "+1", allowing your content to appear in their social profiles.
Note!
If you put a +1 on this post, it will not help me to understand how good it is. But when one of your friends uses Google social media search, the results will show that you liked my post. For you, this indicates that you have like-minded people. And for me, your support is a source of useful traffic, because your support raises my post above others.
Nice, isn't it? Your dedicated contribution to social media boomerang in returning to you, helping you to predict business results.
That is why it is necessary to calculate the approval rate. You can't even imagine how important this is!
Figures for individual social media can be obtained using many tools. This data is easy to find in Google + (see the example at the end). On Facebook, they are displayed in Facebook Insights, although finding them is not so easy (at least, not as easy as it seems in my description). But the data for Twitter, I have not found anywhere (neither in Twitter itself, nor anywhere else).
And finally, the metric that any head of the company will love ...
My regular readers know that my main goal is to teach you to calculate the real profit of your business from any activity in the network.
It is foolish to hope that some figures on the indicators of communication, distribution and approval will be enough to earn endless love and gratitude from your leadership (as well as awards). Well, yes, they are a little interested in all these "SMM-chips." But if you crave adoration from your boss (and I repeat: bonuses), you must be able to count the financial benefits of being in social media.
You are in social media not only for the sake of increasing profits And if you consider this to be your main goal, failure awaits you (how strong the metrics described above will perfectly demonstrate).
But.
A small part of your followers in social networks will go to your main site on the Internet (usually the site). Some will buy something, others will subscribe to the mailing list, others will order a catalog or write a review about the products, register as a partner, create a wish list, call the call center to place an order or ... stay with me ... get your goods or services in your supermarket / store / in the real world.
Do you know what it is called? Macro and microconversion!
Do you know what to do with these macro and microconversions? Measure with their help the economic value!
For all social channels:
Economic value = the sum of short-term and long-term income and savings.
Any properly conducted social media activity boosts the company's bottom line. Something, of course, is incalculable. It does not matter. But your goal should be to be able to calculate the profit from each action.
It is not so difficult to do.
Those of you who have been to one of my last gigs have seen this slide:
Your task is to clearly understand what exactly this orange field means and what size it is. This is not very difficult, just need a little patience and imagination.
And now the magic: at the moment when you are clearly aware of the general strategy of your behavior in social networks, you are segmenting all your activity on the Internet into separate channels.
Then your table will look like the one below, compiled with Google Analytics:
I will focus on the Per Visit Goal Value column (the value of the goal for the visit is the economic value of macro and microconversions made by visitors from social networks. StumbleUpon is the steeper ($ 1.43), Twitter takes the following position (about $ 0.60) then comes Facebook ($ 0.26), which is obviously not the best tool in my case.
Now, not only can I tell my director how much we earn thanks to social media, but I can also tell you exactly which channels and to what extent they contribute to this. You will not be able to be present in all new social media, because they appear so often and so unexpectedly. And the above data can give you an idea of where to be.
If you learn to count economic value, you will never have to beg for development budgets in social media, and your career will start to grow rapidly in the right direction. I promise.
And I repeat again. Social media will bring profit to your business only when you publish interesting content, create the same informational watering that I mentioned earlier, stay in touch with your followers. You can do it even better if you learn in practice how to calculate the financial benefits of social media. Without this, you are just another clever who prophesies a “unpredictable outcome” in an “uncertain future.”
Use Google Analytics, Omniture, WebTrends, CoreIBMInsights, etc.
Setup takes no more than five minutes, while life-long joy is provided.
The rate of communication. Distribution rate Approval rate. Economic value Four simple metrics that will allow you to focus on what is really important in social media will help you realize how well you are working and get a quantitative assessment of the impact of the chosen strategy on your business.
The problem is how to put all this information together. As I mentioned earlier, Excel is your best friend at this stage. And I really hope that developers will soon get tired of creating tools for individual channels (only Twitter, Facebook, Google+, YouTube, etc.). It's time to think about real needs in the world of brands and business and collect all the metrics for all social channels in one place.
Here are some hopeful examples.
Crowdbooster offers an interesting look at Twitter:
You can see the number of retweets (abscissa axis) and responses (circles of different sizes) in general and for a single tweet. That is, indicators and communication, and distribution. Two other metrics are missing, but this is only the beginning.
All my + is a tool for analyzing data from Google+, it works with three of the four metrics recommended in this article:
There is no metric of economic value. But you can get this data from Google Analytics or Site Catalyst in 5 minutes.
If you are doing advertising in social media, then you need to apply the first three metrics. If you are launching a Promoted Tweet, Facebook Like campaign or similar Google + trick, you need to measure the end points of communication, distribution and approval (of course, if you don’t care about the campaign).
If you start advertising direct response in social networks, then, in terms of strategy, here comes the fourth metric, the economic value. It includes both current gain (income through macro-conversions) and long-term gain (through micro-conversions).
To assess the effectiveness of advertising direct response, you should use the metrics that I recommended for other advertising channels (contextual advertising, media, affiliate programs, etc.).
Here is a picture that applies to direct response advertising in social media:
The value of the acquisition. Aim here.
It will be difficult. You will be seduced by clicks and impressions, and average CPCs will try to cloud your mind. Resist their spell. Believe me.
Go to the ninja mode!
Social media provide an amazing opportunity to rethink what is the relationship with customers and the impact on the audience. You have to forget everything that worked in the past (and that is why it is incredibly difficult to do. Many of the world's largest brands should be ashamed of what they do on social networks). You need to reconfigure your brain.
By offering you new metrics, I'm trying to just help you a little to start thinking in a new way.
I hope I can do it.
Eric Olen was inspired by this post to create a very simple and effective tablet, with which you can track all four social media metrics.
As I said, at the moment you can only collect all metrics from all social networks manually. A small price for the opportunity to realistically assess the impact of SMM on your business, is not it?
The first sheet should contain the table itself, with instructions. On the second sheet, you enter the raw data. What could be easier!
One of my main rules is to write only about real problems and methods of measurement, which are also available offline. Now I am going to break this rule - or rather, its second part.
')
I want you to understand the general strategy by which you can take any measurements in SMM. In this case, you are unlikely to be able to easily apply my recommendations in practice.
Why am I doing this?
Social media is developing at an incredible pace. Most of us have no idea how to use this channel correctly. You go on Twitter, and the feeling that you are watching TV (and it breaks my heart). Every minute huge amounts of information are generated, and most of the popular metrics are not so important (I try to remain polite). We are thrown from one extreme to another: on the one hand, the barricades are “IT people”, who give out huge analytical reports (one report in 30 metrics, is it familiar?). On the other hand, enlightened marketers who measure success with highly dubious indicators (“I have 158,632 friends! Hooray!”).
From now on, I want you to use metrics that meet a single criterion: they must show whether you really use the most optimal channel.
To use only useful metrics and, on the basis of the data obtained, to correct one’s behavior in social media is a revolutionary approach, isn’t it?
Stop shaming your brand on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and YouTube. It's time to work with really dedicated followers / friends / subscribers!
So what is really important in social media?
Not the number of friends / followers / subscribers. Not the number of posts / tweets. Not the percentage of your followers and those you follow. And not ... yes, there are still many ridiculous options to offer!
Actually, what is important is what happens after all these posts / tweets / reposts!
Did you manage to get attention? Please? Make people share their impressions? Initiate a discussion? Did you set someone up to something? And it brought economic profit?
So, I propose four metrics that (and this is especially cool!) Can be used absolutely in any social media.
Intrigued? Then go ahead ...
1. Communication rate
When I say that most brands make television out of social networks, I mean that in social media we produce the same incoherent information flows, like those that stream on us from TV screens.
We do not know who is on the other side of the screen. And in order to reach these people, we try to declare ourselves as loudly and often as possible.
But you can do without it. In social media, we can quite easily determine who our follower / friend / subscriber is. We can find out if our messages reach him (almost in real time!). We must not forget that, unlike other channels, we are dealing with social media. And the word “social” includes, first of all, such concepts as “speak”, “listen” and “discuss”.
So why not measure it all?
Communication rate = number of audience comments (or responses) per publication.
Wonderful news: you can use this metric absolutely in any social media. In your blog. Twitter feed. Facebook Google+ YouTube.
What to do with it?
A high rate of communication is possible only when you clearly understand who your audience is, what are the distinguishing features of your brand, what are you especially good at, and what benefits you can bring to your followers.
That's why I love this metric. She immediately makes you do the right thing. And this is a big job.
So, aim for a high rate of communication! Create your own watering hole in the digital universe. And keep only conscious communication with the audience. You can't buy it for marketing money.
Of course, to achieve a high rate of communication is easy and if you behave provocatively and post greasy jokes. But then, your company's shares will not grow a cent, will it?
Remember, we measure not in order to manipulate the results. We measure our business to grow.
Let's continue: the second magic metric ...
2. Spread rate
Each channel has limitations, most often expressed in the number of ads that you can buy. On Google (contextual advertising), on Facebook (ads), on radio (audio advertising), etc.
But social media has a huge advantage that you just have to use.
Not only do you have your own network, but each “node” in your network has its own network! If you follow my advice and publish "incredible, relevant, useful" in understanding your audience posts, you can go beyond your network and bring your messages to more users.
Take, for example, me. Today, I have 57 thousand followers on Twitter and about 12 thousand on Google+. That's all, the limit. Even if every follower of mine reads everything I write, I can reach no more than 57 thousand people on Twitter.
But the size of the “second level” network (followers of my followers) is 6.3 million people. And my real “coverage” is not 57 thousand, but neither more nor less than 6.3 million!
Measure the level of distribution - how actively your followers share your content with their network of contacts.
In Twitter:
Spread rate = number of retweets per tweet.
On Facebook, Google+:
Spread rate = number of posts per post.
In a personal blog, YouTube:
Spread rate = the number of rasters clicks per post (or video).
(Sharing clicks - clicks on buttons that allow sharing content on social networking pages).
What to do with it?
Publish your posts and have fun! But do not forget to keep track of what type of messages causes a real resonance (allows you to spread to the second or even the third level of the network). Analyze the time of publication of such posts, their geographical location, topics, and so on.
And then just post more often this type of post. Then your content will be shared more often, and it will spread more. And most importantly: your visitors will receive the content that they simply can not share!
Over time, people from the second-level network will go to the first-level network. After all, it will become clear to them: you are burning!
Result: contact with the audience and coverage, which for money, well, really, you can not buy.
How to calculate it?
I do not know how easy it is to calculate all the channels at once. Fill each separately in Excel, see the picture above, and create magic!
And here we are greeted by the following metric.
3. Approval rate
I am sure that you saw through my malicious plan to make you really understand your audience (and not stupid to post in your cozy social networks).
Here you have another powerful, even more direct way - an indicator of approval.
In Twitter:
Approval rate = how many times your post was added to favorites
On Facebook:
Approval rate = number of likes per post
On Google+:
Approval rate = amount "+1" per post
In a blog post on YouTube:
Approval rate = number of "+1" and likes per post (video)
What to do with it?
You just need to know what the public likes (if you use the terminology of Facebook) and what doesn't. So you start to better understand what your followers like so much that they shake "+1", allowing your content to appear in their social profiles.
Note!
If you put a +1 on this post, it will not help me to understand how good it is. But when one of your friends uses Google social media search, the results will show that you liked my post. For you, this indicates that you have like-minded people. And for me, your support is a source of useful traffic, because your support raises my post above others.
Nice, isn't it? Your dedicated contribution to social media boomerang in returning to you, helping you to predict business results.
That is why it is necessary to calculate the approval rate. You can't even imagine how important this is!
How to calculate it?
Figures for individual social media can be obtained using many tools. This data is easy to find in Google + (see the example at the end). On Facebook, they are displayed in Facebook Insights, although finding them is not so easy (at least, not as easy as it seems in my description). But the data for Twitter, I have not found anywhere (neither in Twitter itself, nor anywhere else).
And finally, the metric that any head of the company will love ...
4. Economic value
My regular readers know that my main goal is to teach you to calculate the real profit of your business from any activity in the network.
It is foolish to hope that some figures on the indicators of communication, distribution and approval will be enough to earn endless love and gratitude from your leadership (as well as awards). Well, yes, they are a little interested in all these "SMM-chips." But if you crave adoration from your boss (and I repeat: bonuses), you must be able to count the financial benefits of being in social media.
You are in social media not only for the sake of increasing profits And if you consider this to be your main goal, failure awaits you (how strong the metrics described above will perfectly demonstrate).
But.
A small part of your followers in social networks will go to your main site on the Internet (usually the site). Some will buy something, others will subscribe to the mailing list, others will order a catalog or write a review about the products, register as a partner, create a wish list, call the call center to place an order or ... stay with me ... get your goods or services in your supermarket / store / in the real world.
Do you know what it is called? Macro and microconversion!
Do you know what to do with these macro and microconversions? Measure with their help the economic value!
For all social channels:
Economic value = the sum of short-term and long-term income and savings.
Any properly conducted social media activity boosts the company's bottom line. Something, of course, is incalculable. It does not matter. But your goal should be to be able to calculate the profit from each action.
It is not so difficult to do.
What to do with it?
Those of you who have been to one of my last gigs have seen this slide:
Your task is to clearly understand what exactly this orange field means and what size it is. This is not very difficult, just need a little patience and imagination.
And now the magic: at the moment when you are clearly aware of the general strategy of your behavior in social networks, you are segmenting all your activity on the Internet into separate channels.
Then your table will look like the one below, compiled with Google Analytics:
I will focus on the Per Visit Goal Value column (the value of the goal for the visit is the economic value of macro and microconversions made by visitors from social networks. StumbleUpon is the steeper ($ 1.43), Twitter takes the following position (about $ 0.60) then comes Facebook ($ 0.26), which is obviously not the best tool in my case.
Now, not only can I tell my director how much we earn thanks to social media, but I can also tell you exactly which channels and to what extent they contribute to this. You will not be able to be present in all new social media, because they appear so often and so unexpectedly. And the above data can give you an idea of where to be.
If you learn to count economic value, you will never have to beg for development budgets in social media, and your career will start to grow rapidly in the right direction. I promise.
And I repeat again. Social media will bring profit to your business only when you publish interesting content, create the same informational watering that I mentioned earlier, stay in touch with your followers. You can do it even better if you learn in practice how to calculate the financial benefits of social media. Without this, you are just another clever who prophesies a “unpredictable outcome” in an “uncertain future.”
How to count it?
Use Google Analytics, Omniture, WebTrends, CoreIBMInsights, etc.
Setup takes no more than five minutes, while life-long joy is provided.
Four coolest metrics
The rate of communication. Distribution rate Approval rate. Economic value Four simple metrics that will allow you to focus on what is really important in social media will help you realize how well you are working and get a quantitative assessment of the impact of the chosen strategy on your business.
The problem is how to put all this information together. As I mentioned earlier, Excel is your best friend at this stage. And I really hope that developers will soon get tired of creating tools for individual channels (only Twitter, Facebook, Google+, YouTube, etc.). It's time to think about real needs in the world of brands and business and collect all the metrics for all social channels in one place.
Here are some hopeful examples.
Crowdbooster offers an interesting look at Twitter:
You can see the number of retweets (abscissa axis) and responses (circles of different sizes) in general and for a single tweet. That is, indicators and communication, and distribution. Two other metrics are missing, but this is only the beginning.
All my + is a tool for analyzing data from Google+, it works with three of the four metrics recommended in this article:
There is no metric of economic value. But you can get this data from Google Analytics or Site Catalyst in 5 minutes.
And what about advertising in social media?
If you are doing advertising in social media, then you need to apply the first three metrics. If you are launching a Promoted Tweet, Facebook Like campaign or similar Google + trick, you need to measure the end points of communication, distribution and approval (of course, if you don’t care about the campaign).
If you start advertising direct response in social networks, then, in terms of strategy, here comes the fourth metric, the economic value. It includes both current gain (income through macro-conversions) and long-term gain (through micro-conversions).
To assess the effectiveness of advertising direct response, you should use the metrics that I recommended for other advertising channels (contextual advertising, media, affiliate programs, etc.).
Here is a picture that applies to direct response advertising in social media:
The value of the acquisition. Aim here.
It will be difficult. You will be seduced by clicks and impressions, and average CPCs will try to cloud your mind. Resist their spell. Believe me.
Go to the ninja mode!
Finally
Social media provide an amazing opportunity to rethink what is the relationship with customers and the impact on the audience. You have to forget everything that worked in the past (and that is why it is incredibly difficult to do. Many of the world's largest brands should be ashamed of what they do on social networks). You need to reconfigure your brain.
By offering you new metrics, I'm trying to just help you a little to start thinking in a new way.
I hope I can do it.
Update: Bonus.
Eric Olen was inspired by this post to create a very simple and effective tablet, with which you can track all four social media metrics.
As I said, at the moment you can only collect all metrics from all social networks manually. A small price for the opportunity to realistically assess the impact of SMM on your business, is not it?
The first sheet should contain the table itself, with instructions. On the second sheet, you enter the raw data. What could be easier!
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/138566/
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