Success or Failure? : How can audience participation in social media marketing be evaluated?
Success or Failure? : How can audience participation in social media marketing be evaluated?
Social Media has become a worldwide phenomenon. The 24th January 2017 was a landmark day for social media , with the new Digital in 2017 Global Overview report from We Are Social and Hootsuite revealing that more than half of the world’s population now uses the internet. The big question now is with a potential audience of 3.77 billion how can participation be audited?
Davis (2012) suggest there is five key metrics that should be being measured to evaluate an audience :
- Volume
- Reach
- Engagement
- Influence
- Share of Voice
Volume is the easiest method of evaluation and automatically can give you an indication as to whether interest is being generated. Evaluating volume is much more than looking at how many posts there are about your company. Programmes such as Facebook Insights (Figure 1) allow brands to track how this volume changes over time.
(Figure 1)
Not all interest is good interest though. Volume measures the amount of people talking about your brand. Causon (2015) explained that, increasingly, platforms such as Twitter and Facebook are being viewed as the perfect vehicles for customers to escalate complaints, with 12% of the 2,195 consumers we surveyed stating they had taken this course of action. The cheap, convenient and public nature of social media platforms means they are a convenient way for shoppers to register their concerns.
Causon continues however that it’s not all negative. ‘The public is not flocking to social media just to complain; 39% of consumers we surveyed actively provide feedback to organisations online, while 31% make pre-sales enquiries.’
Reach measures the spread of a social media conversation. Evaluating reach can show a brand a measurement of their potential audience size. Just because you have a large audience doesn’t automatically mean that your social media marketing is a success. Davis (2015) explains that reach only becomes powerful when compared to other engagement metrics. Using the amount of retweets on a particular post as an example, if a brands reach is 100,000 users but the post is only retweeted 1,000 times a percentage reach of 1% cannot be considered a success. In summary reach can help contextualise your other metrics.
Engagement is one of the most important areas to measure in social media (Barbe 2017). Engagement metrics allow you to identify which posts are being shared. By analysing the cumulative number of link clicks, shares/retweets, likes and comments etc a company can then look for similarities and differences to determine what types of posts are getting attention.
Web referrals track the click-through vs bounce rate engagement metric to determine if you’re targeting the right audience. Through the attachment of a UTM code to your link leads to particular posts or paid campaign can be monitored so that traffic can be compared by click through rate by source, i.e., direct, search, social, etc. This enables a company to measure the value of traffic generated from social media.
Davis (2012) considers Influence as ‘probably the most controversial social media metric’. She goes on to say that ‘audience size does not necessarily relate to influence’ . It essentially describes that just because the audience is large doesn’t mean that their participation is there. Tools like Klout and PeerIndex assign audience members an influence score. These programmes measure online social capital and the (potential) ability to influence others.
Figure 2: An example Klout Score
Share of voice metrics enable a brand to answer the question ; How does the conversation about my brand compare to conversations about my competitors? Measuring voice metrics enables you to not only measure audience participation with your own brand but more importantly how your audience is participating with competitors. Audience participation enables a company to learn from their competitors’ successes as well as failures; since so many of these social media conversations are publically available online.
Figure 3: Voice Metric Example Measurement
To confirm whether your social media marketing is a success or failure being consistent and preparing are essential. Metrics need to be started being tracked now and these numbers have to be measured on a weekly, monthly and annual basis. If abnormalities arise they should be investigated. These abnormalities could be the difference to creating effective social media marketing or wasting capital on an ineffective strategy.
Figure 4: Chaffey et al (2009) recommends the review of 6 key digital media channel approaches when analysing website and social preferences.
References:
Barbe,R. (2017). Measuring Social Media – the Most Important Engagement Metrics. Available: http://marketing.wtwhmedia.com/measuring-social-media-important-engagement-metrics/. Last accessed 21/11/2017.
Causon, J. (2015). Customer complaints made via social media on the rise. Available: https://www.theguardian.com/media-network/2015/may/21/customer-complaints-social-media-rise. Last accessed 21/11/2017.
Chaffey, D., Ellis-Chadwick, F., Johnston, K., & Mayer. (2009) Internet Marketing: Strategy, development and practice. Harlow: Pearson.
Davis, J. (2012). 5 Essential & Easy Social Media Metrics You Should Be Measuring Right Now. Available: https://blog.kissmetrics.com/essential-social-media-metrics/. Last accessed 21/11/2017.
Kemp, S. (2017). Digital in 2017: Global Overview. Available: https://wearesocial.com/special-reports/digital-in-2017-global-overview. Last accessed 21/11/2017.