More and more organizations are integrating Social Media in their marketing strategy. But how do you determine the impact of Social Media? When is your strategy successful and how do you measure this? In this blog post I will describe how you can measure your Social Media efforts based on four KPI’s.
Measuring Sentiment
Social Media is the perfect tool to work on your brand awareness. Positive messages about your brand and product are therefore indispensable. If this is your goal, it is essential that you measure the sentiment, meaning measuring what is said about your brand about the attitude and behavior of a group of visitors at one time. When measuring sentiment, you need to determine whether a message is positive or negative. Therefore it is necessary that the contents of a message is interpreted.
SOCIAL SEGMENT KPI 1: ENGAGEMENT DURATION
With the engagement duration you make it clear how long a social media visitor is actively involved in your brand. The engagement duration is determined by the elapsed time, measured between the time of the first reaction of a person in a given year and the last reaction of the same person in that same year. The average length of the engagement duration varies greatly by organization and depends on your product or service.
SOCIAL SEGMENT KPI 2: ENGAGEMENT RATIO
Besides the length of the engagement to your product, the degree of involvement is important, the more communication the better. A major pitfall is only measuring the number of fans and likes, because Fans and likes as we all know can be bought or for instance rise enormous when you give an iPad in return to becoming a fan and or giving a like.
A KPI that can measure your social engagement is the engagement ratio. This ratio is determined by engagement in the case of Facebook, the number of likes, comments and shares by mail on a given day divided by the number of fans on the page. This KPI should always be combined with the engagement duration.
SOCIAL SEGMENT KPI 3: RESPONSE RATIO
One way to increase your engagement is getting actively involved in the communication through the use of for instance a community manager or at least a dedicated person who ‘listens’ what is said about your brand and act on it where appropriate to keep the engagement alive. This will ultimately improve your overal engagement. The response ratio is calculated by the number of responses to your wall posts (with regard to Facebook) of the manager of a page divided by the total number of wall posts.
SOCIAL SEGMENT KPI 4: ACTIVITY RATIO
Last but not least you can analyse which visitors are the most active through an activity ratio. The activity ratio is the ratio between the activity of a certain user and the average activity of all visitors.
There are also a lot of tools our there which can help you measure your sentiment, but I have tried a lot of tools and I can tell you from experience that at this point there is not one tool who can give me this information. It is often a combination of tools which cost a lot of money. Another problem is that these tools often do not have integrated your local language, and you need to do a lot of work manually after all. So give the above a go and see how it works for you!