How Is Social Media Activity Measured?

It's not an easy task for organizations to determine how effective their social media presence is at achieving their goals. Though users can get a rough glance at their popularity through the standard number of "likes" or "follows," it takes more than that to truly measure consumer engagement. In order to paint a more complete picture of how an organization uses social media, and how their consumers engage with it, it is important to look at the analytics. Luckily for these companies, there are now a ton of sites out their that specialize in analyzing social media presence.

One commonly used metric is referred to as "impressions." An impression, according to Simply Measured, "...demonstrates the impact you’ve had on those users and the audience it’s helped you reach beyond your inner circle of influence" (Shively). In other words, impressions help users get a better sense of their interconnectivity with the rest of the social universe. This is a good indicator of whether or not something has gone "viral" or not. Impressions take into account things like "retweets," "shares" and "mentions," combining all the data to figure out how far a message really reaches. However, though impressions tell companies how many screens, feeds and timelines they pop up on, they don't take into account how users engage with a message. So although a high number of impressions is always a good sign, there is much more to the picture.

Focusing on the consumer sentiment, in addition to total impressions, has become of utmost importance. While "likes" and "follows" may imply a brand is popular and well-regarded, they can't tell us exactly how consumers engage with it. The actual content of the consumer messages is crucial. The good news is that it has become easier to track these things, as most social networks have implemented search bars, hashtags, and other sorting tools that are at the user's fingertips from the get-go. This makes for an easy, albeit somewhat crude way of tracking ones own social media activity. Though this could be sufficient for small companies, large corporations often need more sophisticated tracking technology for a reliable measure of their reach and the degree of consumer engagement. Your average mom-and-pop business might be able to see all of their consumer engagement with a simple search through the social media site itself, but a company like Pepsi with several million followers needs a more efficient way of measuring collective consumer sentiment.

Many sites have emerged that track consumer sentiment across social media, using algorithms to determine whether a post is positive, negative or neutral. One such site is Trackur, though many others exist. The site essentially works by "reading" social media posts related to your brand and analyzing key words and phrases to determine the overall sentiment of the post. These sentiments are then combined into one "score" that a company can use to determine its "social influence." Though there are flaws to using automated technology to track consumer emotion (ex. sarcasm detection), it's a useful tool and the best way for large scale companies to manage their vast consumer base.

Additionally, there are a host of tools that track who is engaging with a brand. The most popular site is probably Google Analytics, which can track daily visits to a site, the demographics of users, how they got to the site, how long they stay, and which pieces of content are most and least popular (Honeysett). However, the big social media sites like Facebook and Twitter also have their own analytics that can be accessed through their sites.

Overall, social media analytics is a growing field, and there are now many companies that specialize in the discipline. Whatever sites companies choose to use, total impressions, consumer sentiment and user demographics are incredibly important. By using these more advanced metrics to measure social media presence, companies can get a better picture of the state of their brand than ever before.

References

Honeysett, Alex. "4 Ways to Measure Your Social Media Success." Forbes. Forbes Magazine, 22 Aug. 2012. Web. 07 Apr. 2014.

Shively, Kevin. "Twitter Metrics Defined: Potential Impressions." Simply Measured RSS. N.p., 29 May 2013. Web. 07 Apr. 2014.