Practical Social Media Measurement: Awareness, Attention, Reach

When folks initially start to measure social media, they tend toward more traditional ideas of media metrics, or “eyeballs”. The hitch is that today, just gathering lots of eyeballs isn’t really what matters, but rather gathering the right eyeballs and then driving them to some sort of action.

But there’s value in awareness and broadening the reach of your brand if you’re doing it with the right intent, so let’s assume you’ve got that part in mind, and let’s look at some of the kinds of awareness, attention, and reach metrics you might track.

Fans, Followers, Subscribers and Potential Reach

When you talk in these terms,  be aware that you’re looking at potential reach, not actual reach unless you can ensure that all of  your friends or followers are logged in and view your content in a given day. There are loose ideas about peak usage times and percentages for varying social networks, so getting actual reach numbers is going to be a toughie.

For example, 50% of active users log on to Facebook in any given day, meaning only half your fans are even likely to see your status updates, and that among the rests of the posts they view. So you might only be able to bank on a 20%-30% view rate of your total following. Make sense?

For some practical measurement:

• Use the networks/providers to get raw numbers of attention for your account. Look at your potential reach by channel/site, and also across all channels in aggregate.
• If you have daily or monthly peak time and volume statistics for various sites (like your website), estimate what percentage of your friends/fans/followers you can reach with a single post, a week’s worth, a month’s worth, etc.
• Look at the resonance of a single post by keeping track of retweets and shares. You may have to do several searches to find an accurate number, taking into account those that tag/cite you as a source, and those that simply put in the title of the post, your blog name, or a few keywords without giving direct attribution. This is how you look at secondary reach, or the friends of your friends that might see your stuff.
• Add up the follower/friend counts of those that share your content for a ballpark total potential reach for a piece of content.

The hypothesis here is that greater reach means greater likelihood that for every X number of people, one of them will eventually take action, whether that means buy your stuff, sign up for your service, or whatever else you’ve determined as “success”. The goal isn’t to gain the follower, but to propel them to action of some kind. In order to prove that out you have to:

• Look at your average monthly reach across all of your online networks.
• Count the number of transactions/conversions that you can determine as originating in one of those channels during that same month.
• Establish the ratio: For every 10 people of potential reach, we can count 2 conversions or 5 new blog subscribers or whatever your goal is.
• If you’re looking for a dollar value per fan or follower, you need to look at the total value of transactions referred from those online channels, and divide that into the total number of people you reach in a given period to average the revenue out across your following.

If you’re looking for more measurement relative to engagement and activity, stay tuned, as that’s a whole separate post in the series.

Share of Conversation

Share of Conversation is a combination of a few metrics that I happen to really think gives you strong insight. It helps you understand not just the volume of buzz about you, but how present and recognized you are among the conversations you want to be associated with. In other words, the right eyeballs.

The hypothesis here is that if you’re mentioned in relevant conversations, you’ll gain mindshare and therefore increase the likelihood of someone choosing you over a competitor in the same market.

There’s a host of detail over on the Radian6 blog where our CEO Marcel Lebrun explains the methodology for this measurement in more detail. But the high level process looks like this:

• Set up a monitoring post for a topic, subject, or market within which you want to be talked about. For example, if you’re a non-profit working in diabetes research, you might look at conversations around “diabetes research”, “diabetes support”, or whatever else you’d like to be known/found for.
• Within that topic, track and count the posts that mention the topic(s) you’re interested in during a specific time period. 30 days is a good window. (Metric 1: Total Conversation Posts per 30 days)
• Then track the posts that mention that topic AND mention you together during the same timeframe. (Metric 2: Total Brand/Conversation Posts per 30 days)
• Divide Metric 1 by Metric 2. The resulting percentage is your Share of Conversation.

Read Marcel’s post for more information about why this measurement really matters, and has deeper value than just “how many people are talking about us”.

Strength of Referrals/Recommendations

Another way of measuring some of the value of the attention your company receives in social networks is the number of recommendations or referrals you receive.  You’ll not be able to accurately capture the ones that originate offline (i.e. Betty told her friend about you at the party so her friend visited your website today), but you can get a pretty good bead on the paths of recommendations and referrals that are actively articulated online.

To start:

• Set up a monitoring post for mentions of your brand name, and any related variations.
• Among your results each month, classify or tag the ones that appear to be in response to a request for information or referrals from the larger community as a direct recommendation.
• Also classify or tag posts that have a positive sentiment, like “Bob’s Towing is super awesome and I’d use them anytime!”. You could classify that as an implied recommendation.
• Take a percentage snapshot over a week or a month period to see the percentage of posts that hit on your brand profile and that are classified under either referral category.
• For a deeper step, map as many names/profiles as you can that are recipients of the direct recommendations. Overlay them with your prospect/contact database and see how many of them have actually entered your pipeline.
• Watch all of these numbers over chunks of time (monthly, quarterly, annually). Do they increase? Decrease? Can you correlate increased online outreach (how much time you spend interacting and how much content you share/generate) with increased referral percentages over corresponding periods of time?

Inbound Links

Link love is still alive and well on the web, and it still matters. It’s online currency, contributing to things like your visibility on The Almighty Google.  Measuring them is pretty straightforward these days, but again, it’s all about how you use that information to map other behaviors and insights.

• Track the inbound links to your site and resident content using something like Google Webmaster Tools, or a comprehensive monitoring tool like Radian6 (disclosure again: my employer)
• Look at Google Analytics or your other web analytics tools to see the top referring sites to your website.
• Take the Top 10, 20, and view the Compete.com data for each, looking at unique monthly visitors to get a sense of their potential reach (remembering the points in the first bit here about potential reach and probability of eyeballs at any given time for a single piece of content).
• Download the inbound external links table in webmaster tools, and group the links by time period to graph their increase/trending over time.
• See how the ebb and flow of link volume ties to actions on your website or in your database during a corresponding period: search volume, conversions, signups, etc.
• Bonus: Look at the anchor text people are using in the Webmaster tool to get some insights about keywords or effectiveness of identifying terms.

Social Bookmarks

One way of looking at the extended attention you and/or your content are getting in the social realm is to look at how many times people are bookmarking your content on somewhere like Delicious.com (the example I’ll use here). It’s another way of establishing the resonance of the content you produce, or in which you’re mentioned. A few things you can do to manually track at least the potential reach of this kind of attention:

• Use your web analytics program to build unique parameters/URLs for the landing pages that link from Delicious icons on your site and pages. Count how many people click on/through to them. WordPress plug-ins like ShareThis have analytics that will tell you who shares content via Delicious.
• Do a search on Delicious.com for your company or blog name to see hits for bookmarks that contain that name in the post/article title, in the content, or in the tags that users apply to the post.
• For each bookmark, note the number in the blue box to the right that indicates how many people have bookmarked that particular link.
• If you click on that number, you’ll see all the occurrences of that bookmark, as well as a quick dropdown chart that shows bookmark volume over time for that article, so you can see how much residual traction that content has.
• Under individual user profiles in Delicious, click on “Network” to see how many fans someone has on their Delicious account, which can again look at their potential reach. If you’re determined enough, you can count up the total secondary network for each bookmarker. Yep, that’s going to take a long time.  Does secondary reach tell you something meaningful? That’s for you to decide, based on your goals.
• Look at your referral analytics to see where Delicious.com sits on the list. You can likely correlate traffic volume per month with the number of bookmarks in the same time period.
• Also interesting to note: the percentage of new visits to your site as a result of Delicious.com traffic. Is it a good source of fresh attention for you?
• Bonus Tip: Look at the notes people are adding to the bookmarks to get an idea of the terminology and words people are associating with you.

This is a pretty meaty step that may or may not make sense for a lot of people. It takes a good deal of manual work to run these numbers. But if reach is something that’s really important to you because it supports your goals and objectives, it might be worth looking at.

Traffic from Shared Shortened Links

Sites like Twitter have really ramped up the need and use of shortened links like TinyURL or Bit.ly in order to accommodate character limits. But you can still track this information in your overall website analytics to see how it drives people to your website and through conversion paths.

Here,  you’re analyzing which social networks generate active attention, and you can compare them to one another.

• Build a unique URL or parameter for your website destination using Google’s URL generator or parameter tools in your analytics program.
• You can even build a unique one for each piece of content/URL  specific to the social network you plan to post that destination to. In other words, you’d have several unique parameters for the same destination URL and be able to track which came from what site.
• Use a URL shortener with stats like Bit.ly to then shorten the unique URL and use that shortened link to share on your social networks, keeping track of which you share where.
• Track the click-throughs and referrals from each unique URL AND the conversion rate for each (i.e. what percentage of people signed up or bought or visited the pages you wanted them to).

Note, if you’re using something like Google Analytics to do your tracking, you’ll have to set up appropriate tracking code and events on the pages you’re directing people to land on. It’s a bit of learning and not for this post, but it’s really worthwhile if measurement of traffic matters to you. If you can, enlist the help of some analytics pros to set up your paths and tracking to align with your site goals.

Context

Still with me after all of that? Whew.

You’ll note that in each of these examples, I point out the need to map these individual measurements to the goals or actions you want. That’s the only way you know if more eyeballs means something in the hard, quantitative results world.

I will always argue that there are soft, intrinsic benefits to getting more people to know about you and your work, from reputation building to ambient awareness and brand preference – all of which are harder to measure with certainty, and all of which are ultimately about how those things drive business.

But if you’re on a relentless quest to tie traffic and visibility to hard numbers for subscriptions, signups, sales, or leads, you’ve got some work ahead of you. There’s no doubt about that, and it’s very much where I’ve focused here because that seems to be most people’s burning issue. But it CAN be done. And if you do that, the qualitative stuff is the gravy.

And remember most importantly of all: only choose the metrics that help you illustrate progress toward your goals. I can’t emphasize that enough. It all starts with the goals. Otherwise, the metrics exist in a vacuum, and they’re completely meaningless because they tell you nothing.

Wrapping Up

Remember, as I mentioned in my intro to this series, I can’t possibly cover or list every metric here, nor am I an analyst, so you’ll undoubtedly need to refine these processes a bit. The idea is to give you a starting point for a thought process, to get your brain churning on connecting dots and correlating data.What and how you measure will be utterly unique to you.

If you’re looking for more lists of just the metrics themselves, more posts on those over at my delicious bookmarks on social media measurement. And I’d love to hear your additions or ideas in the comments.

Tomorrow, we’ll look at metrics specific to Revenue and Business Development. Later in the week, we’ll tackle Cost Savings, and then Engagement and Interest. Hope to see you here.