Six social media metrics your client wants to check everyday

The most commonly asked question by most of the clients is how they can assess the return on investment (ROI) of their social media activities. Although monetizing every social media activity in order to calculate the ROI might be difficult, so showing an indirect value in terms of key metrics would actually make them feel much happier.
With many social metrics and KPI’s that are possible with social media data, which one to prioritize for a client in order to check their brand health every day would always be a tricky question to answer.

So we thought of bringing you the broad 6 social media metrics that helps a brand to stay on top in social media.
1. Awareness:
This refers to the number of people who talked about a brand on social media. Traditionally brand awareness is measured based on the number of people who are aware of the brand, but in case of social media which gave voice to the voice less, we consider number of social mentions of a brand and other KPI’s to calculate the overall brand awareness score. Here are the sub parameters that I would look in to for getting the brand awareness score.
a)      Social Mentions of a brand: Its important to check whether the social media activities/initiatives by the brand has that synergy effect of triggering the brand awareness on social media or not
b)      Number of fans and Followers (Popularity): With the advent of many social media platforms, most of the brands have now made their decisions wisely on which platforms to choose and to ignore. It’s also important to perform extremely well on the chosen platforms. Here are the key things to monitor.
i. Number of fans added/ decreased [in case of Facebook]
ii.Increase/decrease in People talking about [in case of Facebook]
iii.Number of followers added/decreased [In case of Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, Slide share etc.]
iv.Number of subscribers added/decreased [YouTube]
A combined Awareness Score can also be arrived by using the normalization technique by ranking each sub parameter on a scale of 0 to 100 and then using weighted aggregate of sub parameters score which would be on a scale of 0 to 100, to see the overall performance of the brand on a daily basis. Score can also be used for benchmarking a brands performance against its competitors, which is dealt later on the blog
 Awareness Score = weighted aggregate score of its sub parameters ([W1*Social mentions score+W2*Popularity Score]*100)
Note: Ensure that Social mentions data and popularity data are normalized on a scale of 0-100 using the Industry data and then give the weightage based on the importance you would think for each of the two sub parameters. Also be sure to make W1+W2 = 1, higher preferred variable gets more weightage
2. Brand Opinion:
Having a higher brand awareness for a brand is a gift. However, quality of the buzz in terms of brand opinion matters a lot, as it is this brand opinion that amplifies or acts as an aura for the brand. Larger pie of negative messages around a brand’s buzz volume would actually kill the brand’s prospect and growth. So it’s important for any brand to have a higher chunk of positive messages in the overall buzz.
a) Net Favorability Score is actually a good metric to follow. It is calculated as shown.
Net Favorability Score = ((% of Positive sentiment buzz – % of Negative sentiment buzz)*100) [Positive score indicates a brand has higher positive sentiment compared to its negative sentiment and vice versa]
Net Favorability score ranges from -100 to +100 statistically, but in the real case scenario it ranges from -60 to +60, as neutral conversations comes in to account.
3. Engagement:
A key factor of two way communication which lets both the brand and consumer to share views and opinions on social media. Following are the KPI’s to look out for calculating overall Engagement score
a) Likes, Shares and comments of the Facebook posts:
b) %People Talking about: Although it covers the people who has talked on the page, it’s important to see % of active fans out of the total Facebook fans. It is calculated as given below:
%People Talking about = People Talking about/ Total Number of Facebook Fans
c) Retweets, Mentions, Replies received to the number of Tweets made by a brand on Twitter
d) YouTube, SlideShare Views
e) +1’s, shares, comments of Google+ Posts.
f)   Response Rate by admin: Number of fan posts that were responded by the brand on all platforms
Each KPI can be normalized to a scale of 100 and weighted average aggregation of scores of a brand across all the sub parameters of Engagement can be considered for calculating the overall Engagement score
4. Social Lead Generation:
Social media can also be a key platform for generating leads, while all other KPI’s given in the blog indicate an indirect value reaped from social media, the KPI’s of Social Lead Gen would actually monetize the social media efforts of a brand.
a) Referred revenue from Social Channels
b) Referred Leads from social channels
Increase/Decrease in social referred leads and revenue can be used to calculate the Social lead Gen score on a scale of 0 to 100
5. Competitive Benchmarking:
It’s important for a brand to perform well on social media, but it’s also important to move faster than the industry average. Here are the key KPI’s to look out for competitive benchmarking.
a) Share of Voice = Mentions on a brand/ Sum of mentions of all competitors
b) Facebook Fan share = Number of Facebook fans of a brand/ Sum of fans of all competitors Facebook fans
c) Twitter/Google+/Slide share followers share = Number of Twitter/Google+/Slide share followers of a brand/ Sum of followers of all competitors Twitter/Google+/Slide share followers  [ to be calculated separately for each channel]
d) YouTube Subscribers share = Number of YouTube Subscribers of a brand/ Sum of followers of all competitors YouTube subscribers
e) Presence Score = (Number of channels a brand is present/ Industry Average)*100 [Lets us know whether the brand has entered all the right platforms or not]
f) Others like Net Sentiment score, engagement and net purchase intent score can be used to benchmark a brand against its competitors
A combination of brand presence score, Share of Voice and Channel presence score (Average of Facebook fan share, Twitter, Google+, SlideShare and YouTube subscribers share) can be considered and weighted average aggregated score of various parameters to be used for calculating Competitive benchmarking score
6. Net Purchase Intent score
Although purchase intent may not fully help in finding the Social media ROI, it would definitely help in knowing the consumers viewpoints/preferences in buying a brands product vis-à-vis its competitors product. All the messages that has purchase intent and switching or detracting intent would be considered for calculating the Purchase Intent Score.
Purchase Intent Score = (% of Purchase Intent messages – % of detracting/switching intent messages)*100
%purchase intent messages = Number of messages like “I would like to buy” OR “I want to buy” etc. / Total number of purchase intent messages and detracting/switching intent messages.
%detracting or switching intent messages = Number of messages like “thinking of switching to other brand” OR “don’t buy this brand’s product” etc./ Total number of purchase intent messages and detracting/switching intent messages.
Image Credit: salienceinsight.com
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