How to select the right metrics for social media

Source: Warc Best Practice, December 2016

Downloaded from WARC

This paper explores how to select the correct metrics to measure the social media activity and
engagement of consumers with a brand during a campaign.

There are many reasons that brands should use social - whether to create buzz and build brand
awareness, generate leads, increase customer loyalty, drive web traffic or even boost sales.
In addition to turning a social audience into customers or subscribers, they are just as valuable as
brand ambassadors who will share content with their networks.
The core social media metrics assess growth and overall performance, measuring effectiveness
and efficiency through engagement; content strategy metrics should explain why certain results
occur.
Once an audience is engaging, it is possible to turn them into advocates for the brand by diving
deep into their social behaviour to understand who they are.
Case studies include the UK bank Halifax, and the international charity Amnesty International.

Jump to:
Definition | Where to start | Essentials | Checklist | Case studies | Further reading

Definition
Social media is officially defined as "forms of electronic communication (such as Web sites for social networking
and microblogging) through which users create online communities to share information, ideas, personal
messages, and other content (as videos)". For the purposes of this paper it is defined as the social networks
whose audiences are measured such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, G+, Tumblr, Pinterest and
LinkedIn.

Metrics are defined as the specific social media measurements that are used to assess the success of social
media campaigns and overall strategies.
Where to start
Social Media has become the quintessential tool for brands and content producers to interact with consumers.
There are many reasons that brands should use social—whether it's to create buzz and build brand awareness,
generate leads, increase customer loyalty, drive web traffic or even boost sales. Social can also have broader
implications on your entire business.

In addition to turning your social audience into customers or subscribers, they're just as valuable as brand
ambassadors who will share your content with their networks.

Sharing is the most coveted social action. It's difficult to pin-down the optimal number of shares as there are
many different variables to consider; which platform are you on? What content strategy do you employ the most
i.e. photo or video? Marketers also need to consider the type of vertical they are in and the size of the audience.
While some strategies will resonate more than others, any share is valuable.

The chart below looks at social sharing in three categories - US Consumer Goods, US Publishing, and US
Retail over a 9-month period during 2014, 2015 and 2016. There are some notable trends. US Consumer goods
saw no or negative growth year over year across Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Tumblr. While US Publishing
increased by 66% total shares on Facebook and 13% on Twitter between 2015 and 2016. Between 2014 and
2015 social shares increased for US Publishing across Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Tumblr. Elsewhere,
US Retail grew between 2014 and 2015 on Facebook and Twitter, it only grew on Facebook and Twitter
between 2015 and 2016. These figures illustrate how different industries have different sized followings. As
such, there is no one size fits all approach to social media strategy. Therefore, it is advisable to measure your
success against those operating in the same sector, not elsewhere.

Social Shares across US Consumer Goods, Publishing, and Retail Categories

Shares Retweets Reshares Reblogs

(Total) FB (Total) TW (Total) GP (Total) TB

US*
Consumer -6% -10% -75% -42%
Goods 2016
over
US*
2015 66% 13% -50% -49%
Publishing

US* Retail 16% -3% -68% -82%

US*
Consumer -7% 0% -26% -66%
Goods 2015
over
US*
2014 75% 64% 0% 8%
Publishing

US* Retail 3% 14% 19% -42%

The value of an endorsement coming from someone we know i.e. an influencer, taste-maker, celebrity, friend or
family member, carries a lot of intrinsic credibility. So not only does a brand gain qualitative trust value, it also
generates more impressions every time a piece of content is shared.

And figuring out how to create the type of content that resonates with your audience and entices them to amplify
your messaging can't be done without evaluating the right metrics. They might vary slightly, but identifying them
starts with three building blocks that consistently apply to social strategies regardless of industry or strategy.

If you don't already, you'll soon be able to answer the following questions about your brand's social media
strategy and performance:

Do you know how to measure your current social media results?

What are your competitors' best practices and how are they performing overall?
How loyal is your audience, compared to your competitors?

It's easy to get seduced by certain metrics. Marketers are wired to love big numbers and to believe that bigger is
better.

But in the case of measuring social media, the fixation with biggest number can sometimes lead to misleading
results. Just focusing on the number of fans or followers may not be the best indicator of the real value of a
brand's social community.

There are three building blocks that can help drive social marketing success that have little to do with big
numbers.

1. Core Social Media Metrics are the foundation for measuring whether the social media posts you produce
resonate with your audience.
2. Content Strategy Metrics look beyond engagement to identify if the type of content and how and when you
produce it is leading to positive results.
3. Audience Quality Metrics help marketers understand how best to engage audiences based on their core
values by diving deeper into their behaviours on social.

Rather than focusing on potential fans, savvy social brands hone in on quality activity and interactions. By using
audience-centric social media metrics and competitive benchmarking, brands can better understand their
performance and identify opportunities to improve their social impact.

Essentials
Building Block 1: Core Social Media Metrics

The core social media metrics assess growth and overall performance. They allow brands to measure the
effectiveness and efficiency of their social media efforts over time by tracking engagement.

Core Social Media Metrics:

Unique engaged audience – the number of people who engaged at least once with your social content
throughout the time period
Amplification – any act of social sharing between a piece of brand content, and a consumer
 Consistent activation – average engagement on any social platform, which includes any action except
views, which are counted separately because videos don't necessarily require any action to be watched
Impressions – the number of times your content is viewed
Video views – the number of views captured by video content on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube

Growth and Performance metrics are the foundation for the measurement of any brand's social media content
and assessing that impact with audiences. These by-the-numbers metrics populate scorecards and monthly
benchmarks or RFPs (Request for proposal).

In addition to traditional engagement metrics, views have emerged as a crucial metric to measure the virality of
campaigns. The more content is viewed, the more attractive it becomes as a vehicle for pre-roll advertising.

Understanding these core social media metrics is the starting point for any brand looking to connect with an
audience and convert them to customers or subscribers.

Building Block 2: Content Strategy Metrics

Content Strategy Metrics help answer the questions: Why am I getting these results? How can I improve those
results? What is my competitor doing that's getting different results that I should consider?

They illuminate the tactics that produce the most compelling content, providing ways to benchmark your social
results and gain awareness of marketplace best practices.

On a day-to-day basis, content strategy metrics help you determine what you should continue posting (and what
you shouldn't) to determine the future success of your social campaigns. And they allow you to monitor what
content is being produced by your competitors.

Content Strategy Metrics:

Content type – videos (live, recorded, gifs, vines, slideshows, etc.) vs. photos (or memes) vs. text-only
content vs. links
Time of day and day of week combinations – most important for in-the-moment platforms like Twitter and
Instagram; it's important to know when content reaches your audience, but more important to understand
when your audience is motivated to do something about your content
Topics, calls to action – asking for shares on Facebook or retweets on Twitter, sometimes in exchange for
something like entering a contest or sweepstakes

Evaluate the competition to understand what resonates with audiences similar to yours. But keep in mind,
different types of content don't perform the same across categories. So what works for one brand may not work
for another.

Building Block 3: Audience Quality Metrics

Audience quality metrics evaluate your fans and followers' social interactions and behaviour to help you
understand their core values and what activates them.

Or more simply put, now that your audience is engaging, are they becoming loyal advocates?

This is the biggest untapped resource when it comes to social media. There's a lot to be learned here that can
have broad applicability across all areas of business.
Imagine knowing the audience so well that it enables a marketer to understand how best to reach them using
other mediums. Or even what products and services they'll prefer, which could drive long-term planning
decisions. There is no downside to knowing why people hand you their money and laud your successes on
social.

Audience Quality Metrics:

Percentage of returners – did your audience stick with you after the campaign or let you go when it ended?
Frequency of actions – how often your users take action on your content and remain active, over time and
during campaigns
Demographics – understanding implications of demographics of each platform is important
Brand cross engagement – among your audience, the other brands or content they also engage with will
help you understand them better while identifying partnership opportunities; think of it as an affinity map
and profiling tool of sorts
Percentage of shares or retweets – what percentage of your audience is amplifying your content on
Facebook and Twitter; if it's more than half, you're onto something

Understanding your fans and followers will help you identify influencers whom your brand already engages.
These social media professionals often boast much larger and more engaged audiences who can amplify your
messaging and help your brand reach a broader group of people.

This kind of audience intelligence can also help brands identify more traditional advertising partnerships for co-
branding campaigns and cross-promotional opportunities.

Checklist
When it comes to measuring your social media campaigns and assessing your strategy to determine if you're
posting the type of content that resonates with your audience and turn them into loyal brand advocates, follow
these steps:

1. Ditch big numbers like your overall fan and follower counts. They're nice to look at, but they don't tell you
much about how your audience perceives your brand.
2. Adopt core social media metrics: unique engaged audience, social amplification, consistency of activation,
impressions and video views. These will help you assess the engagement level of your audience.
3. Compare your content strategy to your competition to find out what you can learn from the way they
approach social. What's working for you? What isn't? Can you apply anything that you've learned about
your competitors to your strategy?
4. Now that your audience is engaging, it's time to turn them into advocates for your brand by diving deep into
their social behaviour to understand who they are. This audience intelligence will also help you identify
other social partnership opportunities.

Case studies
Halifax: Making money extra easy, Warc Prize for Social Strategy: Grand Prix, 2016
This case study demonstrates how Halifax, the UK's third largest bank, revamped its social strategy to stand out
from competition. Halifax measured engagement in the campaigns by tracking content shares and clicks on
shared links. The study also notes that to measure Brand Lift- the bank measured the association of Halifax with
"easy to bank with" and consideration" – measurements that proved to have a positive correlation with ROI.

How Amnesty International took on the UK government, and won, Warc Prize for Social Strategy:
Bronze and Special Award for Low Budget, 2016

This case study shows how Amnesty International, a human rights activist group built a social media campaign
that successfully changed European law and raised awareness. Amnesty International had a limited budget (15K
GBP) and wanted to reach audiences outside of Amnesty base - very difficult to achieve without investing in
promoted posts. To do this, the social media team developed a message that focused on how current EU gun
laws affected everyone. Rather than looking at those affected historically, Amnesty showed how current gun
laws affected a localised audience in and around London. Amnesty international produced locally compelling
content that drove organic actions (comments, shares and likes) to an audience that it hadn't been able to reach
before.

Nation's Largest Insurance Provider Sees Record Engagement Spike

Shareablee partnered with the nation's largest insurance provider and delivered visibility into the competitive
landscape and uncovered its audience psychographics and behavior. These insights led the insurance provider
to create the kind of content that activated its audience and drove engagement. The insurance provider
experienced 525% year-over-year engagement growth on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Its Facebook
impressions also grew year over year by 219%. And the insurance provider saw a 10x year-over-year increase
in its unique engaged audience on Facebook.

Entertainment Publisher Proves Brand Lift for Advertisers on Social Media

An entertainment publisher was investigating new revenue streams and used Shareablee to identify advertising
partnerships on Facebook and prove the value of its social audience. The publisher partnered with a consumer
goods brand whose audience had an overlapping affinity with it. The two created a co-branded campaign that
demonstrated how a brand can leverage a much larger audience to gain market share. After the campaign, 14%
of the consumer goods brand's audience engaged with the publisher, compared with just 5% before.

Further reading
Warc Topic Page: Social Media

Warc Topic Page: Digital Media

Warc Case Studies: Social Media (Lead Media)

What Makes Brands' Social Content Shareable on Facebook? An Analysis that Demonstrates the
Power of Online Trust and Attention

How Organic Reach on Facebook Works: (And Why the Sky is Not Falling for Brands on Social Media)

About the author

Tania Yuki is CEO and founder of Shareablee, the leading authority on audience intelligence, competitive
benchmarking and actionable insights for social media. The official social media analytics partner of comScore,
Shareablee measures a census of global properties and collects brand audience and engagement data across
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, Tumblr, and YouTube.

© Copyright Warc 2016

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