Measure Social Media Like a Pro: Social Media Analytics Uncovered

Measure Social Media Like a Pro: Social Media Analytics Uncovered

To kick off the year 2016, more than 1 billion people logged onto Facebook. Every day, 934 million users access Facebook from their mobile devices. And more than 1.59 billion people are expected to access the social network each month. It is the world s most essential advertising and content platform - and that s not even including Instagram, with its more than 400 million mobile users and the ability to deliver highly visual content and ads directly to them. In order to keep up and engage effectively with your audience across social channels, you absolutely need to track your own performance and your competitors performances, benchmark your page against itself and against those competitors, and use insights to optimize and iterate your social strategy. If you don t, you re Flying Blind. What s Flying Blind? It means You re only listening - not using deep analysis to inform your social strategy Relying only on native social platform tools like Facebook Insights and Twitter Analytics Ignoring what the competition is up to Not benchmarking your own activity against the wider market No social marketer should be Flying Blind in 2016. Here s what you need to know to make sure you don t get stuck in the past. This guide to social media analytics includes: 1. Why It s Important to Measure Your Social Success 2. How Social Analytics Works 3. What to Measure on Social Media 4. A Look at Built-in vs. Independent Analytics Platforms 5. The Value of Comparative Analytics

1. Why It s Important to Measure Your Social Success Social media, in all its forms, is an increasingly important channel for marketers every day. Not long ago, a few Facebook posts and a tweet here and there would be enough to generate enough fan growth to keep your bosses happy. Today, every business has to be savvy enough to compete with millions of other businesses for users attentions, and keep track of emerging platforms and trends to find out where your Fans live online. Brands aren t just competing against their direct competition on fans News Feeds - they are doing battle with their fans friends and hundreds of other pages, including everything from entertainment, celebrities, and the latest news (Picture 1). You have to rise above the noise. Fans like more pages, and brands are posting more content than ever before. In 2009 Only 7 Posts per Month In 2015 34 Posts per Month Picture 1: The number of Facebook posts per month increased from only 7 in 2009 to 34 in 2015. Additionally, 82% of marketers promote some of their Facebook posts. All together, this means the market for engagement on Facebook is more necessary and more competitive than ever. Brands are committing more and more budget to social, whether this is for boosting their post Reach, creating content, and building teams to provide effective social customer care. With a bigger spend, comes more pressure on performance and effectiveness - you need to show real social ROI. Independent analytics tools add extra value by allowing you to track core metrics and measuring against the right benchmarks that feed directly into your marketing goals.

2. How Social Analytics Works First of all, social analytics are very different from social listening. Where as social listening allows you to monitor how keywords are discussed across social channels, social analytics measure the performance of many social profiles in all metrics available. With social analytics you are able to judge your progress in succeeding with your selected KPIs, both for your own brand and against other profiles and industries. To get this information, tools like Socialbakers Analytics pull their data from a variety of sources, both public and private, including API s from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and more. Once this data is collected it is put through a number of calculations and formulas. It is also tagged so that it can be visualized in a logical and easy-tounderstand way (Picture 2). Insights Analytics Restricted API Socialbakers Free Stats Public API Analytics Cloud Socialbakers Analytics Socialbakers Community Crowdsourcing Socialbakers collects raw social media data from publicly accessible API s as well as restricted API s accessible only to page admins. We store the data in a data cloud, where we process and recalculate it into the metrics. Thanks to the large and talented community of social media marketers who come to Socialbakers.com, we are able to categorize social profiles by region and industry and create unique benchmarks based on their suggested tags. For some platforms, such as Facebook, social analytics tools can show both public and private metrics. Private metrics are those that are available only to you as the administrator of the profile you are studying, and can t be compared to competitors. Public metrics, on the other hand, can be compared to your competition and the wider industry. This allows you to benchmark performance across public metrics to gain an understanding of where your performance stands in comparison. Public Metrics Include Private Metrics Include Interactions (Absolute Engagement) Engagement Rate Audience Size Shareability Response Rates Organic Reach Paid Reach Clickthroughs Audience Demographics Reach Engagement

3. What to Measure on Social Media Once you ve got your head around measuring your social media activity and how that works, the next key decision is choosing which metrics to measure on each social media platform. At Socialbakers we advise businesses in nearly every industry in every corner of the globe on which metrics to prioritize. As with everything, there are no quick answers in choosing the metrics you should track. What you need to track will ultimately be determined by your objectives and your social media plan. If you are focused on brand awareness, for instance, the metrics you choose will naturally be different than if you focus on direct sales. We believe that social is not about just one metric, but about all of them, and that understanding the whole picture gives you a greater chance of success. On Facebook Some of the key metrics to measure are Total Interactions (Absolute Engagement) Engagement Rate Reach Response Rate It is essential to benchmark your performance with these metrics over time. All of the above metrics, with the exception of Reach (which is accessible only to Page Admins), are public metrics and therefore available for all your competitors. Total Interactions Interactions is an absolute engagement metric. It is the sum of the Likes, Comments, and Shares your post receives. Measuring this number is valuable for two reasons: First, so you can understand how your Fans interact with different content from your page; and second, to adjust your content plan to optimize for the interaction types that are most valuable for your business. Engagement Rate Engagement rate is the number of total Interactions drawn by your content, divided by the total audience on your Facebook Page. It has been strongly affected by the infusion of paid media described above, in the Interactions section.

Reach Reach is the number of people who see a given Facebook post. On average around 4-9% of your Facebook fans will see your posts organically; this is controlled by engagement levels and recency of engagement on a per-user basis. Remember, Reach is more important than your audience size - these are the people actually seeing your content in their News Feeds. Measuring your Reach figures and using them to identify when and where to improve your content strategy is key to achieving social media success. Organic Reach is where users see your content after liking your page, or because their friends have interacted with you. Paid Reach is where a user sees a boosted post of yours in their News Feed. Post boosting is becoming massively important for this reason, as the majority of ads (about 68% in Q4) are moving to News Feed and mobile, and the potential to boost your Reach is huge. Posts Competitor 1 Competitor 2 Paid 62 % Organic 36 % N/A 2 % Paid 29 % Organic 71 % Paid 81 % Organic 17 % N/A 2 % Data Range: July 1, 2014 - September 30, 2014 by Picture 3. An example of three different brands post promotion strategies. With Socialbakers Promoted Post Detection tool, you can see how your competitors are allocating their social content budgets - and how effective that strategy is for gaining them total Interactions. Response Time Response time is also very important, and a great indication of quality customer care on social networks. Some brands, such as KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, Walmart, and Best Buy, are truly Socially Devoted and have fully integrated customer care into their social media channels this allows them to deal with a huge amount of questions in just a matter of minutes.

Evolution of Question Response Rate 2012-2015 Question Response Rate on Facebook Picture 4. Answering at least 65% of questions asked on Facebook is the global standard. Twitter YouTube Instagram LinkedIn Total Followers Total Subscribers Total Followers Total Followers Retweets, Replies, Favorites Video Views Interactions Status Engagement Rate Daily Mentions Likes / Dislikes Number of Posts Number of Status Updates

4. Native vs. Independent Analytics Tools If you know the metrics you want to measure, the next step is finding out how to measure them. There are some built-in options available for some platforms, such as Facebook Insights, which allows you to track Facebook audience size and Reach and other complementary metrics for pages you admin. However, using these options only means you ll never know how your business performs in your potential customers eyes - it s the definition of Flying Blind. Independent analytics tools like Socialbakers Analytics give you a much wider view of your performance, as they allow you to track both private and public metrics together, and public metrics (as well as post boosting strategy, EdgeRank performance, and other insights) for your competition. To truly understand the whole picture and make your social marketing efforts a valuable asset to your brand, independent analytics tools are a must. Capabilities Overview Socialbakers Analytics Facebook Insights Metrics 50+ 4 Data History Up To 3 Years 7 Days Multi-Platform Support Time Zone Support Industry & Regional Benchmarks Labels Mobile Access One click reports Social Customer Care Metrics Content Newsfeed Key Influencers Admin & User Post Sources Post Details User Activity Tracking Competitive analysis

5. The Value of Comparative Analytics & Benchmarking Social media marketing is no longer just about growing your audience. Instead, it s about creating shareable content, using competitive benchmarking to understand that content s performance with your audience, and then amplifying it to the best audience possible. It s also essential to provide top-flight, around-the-clock customer care to incoming customer queries on both Facebook and Twitter. Socially Devoted brands see 3x more Interactions than their unresponsive counterparts - and that translates to real business value. Every social marketer knows how important it is to record KPIs - but that doesn t just include your own. It also means knowing how you compare to your competition. Don t measure in isolation Competitive analysis is the key to an objective evaluation of social media success. Socialbakers Analytics is made for that, offering comparisons to dozens of preset industry and regional benchmarks. It isn t just your direct competitors you need to track. It s also about the wider ecosystem your retail and media partners, other competitors content and paid strategies, and beyond that, other entities with whom you re competing for attention in the News Feed. Direct Competitors Ecosystem Newsfeed Competition Picture 5. The competition for Fans eyes in the News Feed includes more than just your business competitors.

Benchmarking and competitive analysis helps to Quickly identify what KPIs need to be improved Picture 6. The Socialbakers Analytics dashboard with a list of all monitored pages and an overview of KPIs for all pages in one place. It shows some interesting results, like that Air France is posting 10 times more per day than their competition. But while their competition is posting less, they receive more interactions per 1000 fans, meaning that they are posting more effectively. In the same view, you can see how well the brands are communicating with their audiences. We can clearly see that American and Southwest Airlines are lagging behind the competition - they respond slowly, their response rate is low although they receive the fewest questions! Here, we ve compared several top airlines by multiple KPIs. With this, Socialbakers Analytics users can use data to take action and make immediate, informed decisions. Identify what content works and drives engagement Socialbakers Analytics offers a powerful content News Feed where all of your and your competitors posts are compiled to display the best performances for each KPI. You can order and filter out posts based on their number of Interactions, Likes, Comments, and Shares, or by the post type (links, statuses, photos, or videos).

Measure and improve social customer care Here s an example of how competitive benchmarking with Socialbakers Analytics can help build brand affinity through monitoring social customer care metrics. Even though Southwest Airlines competitors receive more questions than they do, they manage to respond to a higher percentage faster than Southwest. Alitalia Air France American Airlines Southwest Airlines It looks like their whole social customer care operation could use some attention. The bottom line is that Competitive Analysis is necessary To identify what content works best and to drive engagement To deliver better social customer care Because it both leads to higher conversions and positive ROI from social

Socialbakers Clients consistently do better on metrics like these compared to the rest of the market. This table shows how 3 major KPI s progressed after brands began using Socialbakers Analytics. After 3 months, Socialbakers clients exceeded industry standards in several areas, including Fan Growth (by 28%), Organic Reach (by 20%), and Interactions (by 28%). Socialbakers Analytics lets social media marketers do more in-depth competitive analysis, report more quickly, identify which content creates better relationships with your audience, and monitor social customer care efforts. Metric 1st month using Socialbakers Analytics 2nd month using Socialbakers Analytics 3rd month using Socialbakers Analytics Fan Growth +15 % +20 % +24 % Organic Reach +6 % +20 % +20 % Interactions +16 % +18 % +28 % Conclusion Every aspect of your business stands to benefit from using an independent analytics platform that includes both public and private metrics. In today s social media landscape, every marketer needs to understand their competitive context. It is crucial to optimize your performance and continually improve it over time. Remember, it is also essential to report to your stakeholders to share the results of your social media success across your whole organization. With a tool like Socialbakers Analytics, everything you need to succeed is in your hands.

Contact us If you have any questions about the Measure Social Media like a Pro or want to suggest something for it - get in touch with us at info@socialbakers.com.