A Four Step Program for Creating a Social Analytics Framework

 

It’s time to get social! In today’s hyper-connected world, organizations are increasingly relying on social media and online consumer interactions to change the way they do business. Companies and brands have recognized that their customer base is vocal about products and services and are openly sharing brand experiences in online conversations every day through social channels.

What is Social Analytics?

Until recently, social monitoring lacked the sophisticated analytics capabilities needed to determine important business insights. This is where social analytics has stepped in. Social analytics has become a primary form of business intelligence used to identify, predict, and respond to consumer behavior. This type of analytics has reached a point where nearly every click that is made online generates valuable data that is collectible.

Social analytics helps brands and companies identify which social media tools and strategies are measurably benefiting the goals of the business. These analytics help in determining what has a neutral or negative effect on the objective. This data also helps in determining the return on investment (ROI) of social media strategies. This will allow the company or brand to continually plan how to best use social media to its advantage.

Difficulties Measuring Social Analytics

While social analytics have become mainstream, companies still struggle with how to measure, analyze, and act on social data and insights. The data from social media can be viewed as intensive, messy, or unstructured. There are an increasing number of new behaviors that must be captured, measured, and interpreted over time. In fact, despite the advances in integrating social media into business, a majority of companies do not have standard frameworks in place to measure the value of social media.

Four Basic Steps in Creating a Social Media Framework

There are four basic, yet commonly overlooked, steps a company should explore when beginning to create a social media framework.

1.    Align the Social Strategy of the Company with Business Objectives. The first step in social media measurement is to determine the core business objectives. Then create business strategies that support these objectives. This should be done before the company begins to develop or assess social strategies. While it is important to think in terms of the future, the reality of this market means that a company must plan for the present.

2.    Determine How the Company Will Measure Success. Determine how success will be measured from a business perspective. It is incredibly useful to determine whether the goal is to drive brand and/or product awareness, improve search engine placement, generate leads, or just to simply to learn from the generated data.

3.    Evaluate the Organization’s Readiness to Measure Social Media. This is one of the most critical elements of social media measurement strategy. Assess your resources, the level of domain, analytical and tool expertise needed, and the current state of internal collaboration. Many companies lack sufficiently trained staff for social media measurement and delegate it to overcommitted and under-prepared employees. This is, quite simply, a recipe for failure.

4.    Choose Tools in Light of Strategy, Metrics, and Organization. Once the company knows what it’s trying to accomplish, how it will measure success, and what resources are available, it’s time for tool selection. This is still a very new industry, so a company should be aware that social analytics tools change quickly. While there are a large number of social analytic tools available, there is no single best tool for every objective or every business.

Once the Framework is in Place

If a company keeps these four simple framework steps in mind as it begins to create a social media strategy, a baseline and foundation for targeting useful social analytics will also be created. Moving forward, the company or brand will be able to more accurately assess customer activity - not just on social networks but all over the web. This will allow the company to more accurately determine how customers can potentially be engaged in ways that will be more meaningful. When this happens, advertising ceases to be viewed as just a commercial endeavor and instead combines into useful interaction with the consumer.

For more information about creating a social media framework see:

Our Social Media Framework:  http://thirdwaveberlin.com/2012/04/our-social-media-strategy-framework/

Social Media Strategy Learning Curve and Framework:

http://www.socialmediaexplorer.com/social-media-marketing/social-media-strategy-learning-curve-and-framework/

Video - Social Media Strategy Framework: Explanation and guide

References Include:

1)     http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2011/02/10/spend-wisely-finally-an-investment-roadmap-for-social-business-buyers-altimeter-report/?goback=%2Egde_1852106_member_46420305

2)     http://www.slideshare.net/jeremiah_owyang/social-readiness-how-advanced-companies-prepare

3)     http://mashable.com/2012/05/05/adobe-digital-selves/

4)     http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/social-analytics-isnt-just-for-social-ne/240142166

5)     http://www.slideshare.net/setlinger/social-analytics-2012-at-social-media-week-sf

6)     http://econsultancy.com/us/blog/10925-80-of-online-retailers-are-using-google-analytics-incorrectly

7)     http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/

Metrics for Social Analytics

Due to the complexity of the structure and conversations going on the social networks, it's important to note the uniqueness of social analytics against web analytics in general sense.

1. What's the difference between social analytics and web analytics in general? What are the metrics usually used in the latter?

Generally speaking, web analytics can reflect the whole business process from product promotion to sales completion, whereas social analytics are more focused on the tunnel through which the product is propagated and customer acceptance.

According to Web Analytics 2.0, a metric is quantitative measurement of statistics describing events or trends on a website. However, as suggested by Paul. G Strupp, two types of metrics are commonly used in web analytics, one is MTC (Measure to Control), and the other is MTA (Measure to Analyze). The former is usually quantitative measurement providing answers to questions like "How many...?" " How much...?" "How often...?", while the latter could be both quantitative and qualitative that answers questions like "Why...?" "Who...?" "Where...?" "How are users...?"

Since the approach of web analytics has progressed into "outcome-based" era, the metrics adopted for each individual analysis case are very largely dependent on the objectives of the organization or individual that the analysis is serving. Below is some examples of objective-oriented metrics selection,

• Conversation Rate or Revenue Trends for eCommerce websites like Amazon.
• Depth of Visit for websites like Wonkblog.
• Visitor loyalty for websites like Facebook.

However, as diverse as the selections of metrics might be, web analytics in general serve the goal of discovering visitor browsing and purchasing behaviors. Being a very trendy part of this topic, social analytics place more emphasis on the effectiveness of the online propagation of certain product or brand, as well as the customer perspectives towards them.

2. Metrics chosen in social analytics

Each metric chosen is tightly associated with certain KPI. Differentiated by complexity of deriving from raw data and ease of interpreting into business sense, each KPI can be reflected by several basic metrics as well as advanced ones. 

Let's say your company is in industry IND, and you trying to promote or track you product PRO online. we'll see how it works on the platforms of social networks, and which metrics we want to look at.

• KPI: BRAND AWARENESS & REPUTATION

Basic Metric: SOV ( Figure 1.1)

Figure 1.1

Number of Conversations mentioning your product or brand out of the total number of industry conversations.

           

Advanced Metric:  SOV (Figure 1.2)

Figure 1.2

Number of brand or product mentions by influencers & vocal customers out of total number of relevant mentions.

• KPI: MARKETING PROGRAM EFFECTIVENESS

Basic Metrics: 

Social Reach: total # of followers across all social platforms (Figure 2.1)

Figure 2.1

Growth: Month-over-Month or Quarter-over-Quarter

Engagement = (likes+ shares+ retweets+ blog comments)/(# of published posts of pieces of comment) (Figure 2.2)

Figure 2.2

Advanced Metrics:

Engagement: by campaign; per specific social platform; per specific post.

Influencer Engagement = # of influencers aware of brand out of total # of industry influencer (Figure 2.3)

Figure 2.3

Cost/ Benefit Analysis = ROI of special campaigns/ ROI of traditional marketing campaign

• KPI: LEAD GENERATION EFFECTIVENESS

Basic Metric: Lead Generation Effectiveness (Figure 3.1)

Figure 3.1

Number of new leads from social channels out of number of total leads 

Advanced Metric: 

Lead Generation Effectiveness: Number of leads generated or influenced by social campaign out of number of total leads

• KPI: INCREASED SALES; SHORTER SALES CYCLES

Basic Metrics:

Social Sales Effectiveness = # of sales coming from social channels out of total sales;

Growth In Sales From Social Channels: Month-over-Month; Quarter-over-Quarter; Year-over-Year.

Advanced Metrics:

Repeat Purchases = # of customers buying more due to social engagement out of # of purchase

Overall Sales Effectiveness: Growth in average deal size; shorter sales cycles; more deals per sales person due to deeper customer insight

• KPI: CUSTOMER SATISFACTION; REDUCED CHURN

Basic Metric: Complaint Visibility/ Feedback (Figure 4.1)

Figure 4.1

Ability of customer service reps to post or comment on brands social channels

Advanced Metric: Social Comment Integration (Figure 4.2)

Figure 4.2

Ability to integrate social customer data & communication into voice of customer applications;

Proactive issue escalation (mining of social posts from customers to identify customer service issues or defection triggers);

Text & Sentiment analysis of social posts of customers.

Reference:

Kaushik, Avinash. Web Analytics 2.0. Indiana: Wiley Pubulishing, Inc., 2010.

http://www.libqual.org/documents/admin/arl_emetrics_workshop_june05.pdf

Actionable Social Analytics: From Social Media Metrics To Business Insight. April, 2012.

YouTube and Social Media Adverting

Social media is one of the hottest topic in marketing right now, not only does it expose your brand and raises awareness to the customer, it’s usually less expensive than  other forms of media.  In these blog we will discuss advertising on YouTube, more specifically some of the advertising vehicles YouTube uses and what type of business scenarios can be successful in them.  YouTube is a huge vehicle for adverting with over 4 billion views a day and 800 unique users every month, if it were a search engine it would be the 2^nd largest search engine on the web twice as large as Yahoo and Bing combined! (1.)

Display Ads

Masthead

The first ad type we are going to discuss is the YouTube Masthead. The Masthead is what you see when you first log into you tube, this advertising is usually better suited for larger companies, with a ticket cost of 375K a day this can be a pretty pricey advertising campaign.  (2)  These ads are a 970X250 and can include videos in them.

The home page generates over 45 million views per day, this translates to a cost of less than a cent per visitor or about $8.33 per thousand. This is a great option for raising awareness and letting the customer interact with the brand. Since most of these ads let you play the video beyond just the ad, you can create a very interactive offering for your consumer. Here is a great example from one of the most awesome film ever made by men, women, or God! Enjoy

Click Here and Be Amazed!

This example is actually an Expandable Masthead, it runs from 970X250 to 9750X500 when selected. It will also let your customer subscribe to the advertisers channel, and allows the advertiser to keep in constant contact with you through uploaded videos.

Standard Banner Ads

Since most of us are not going to be able to dish out 375K for our small business ads (except if you’re Mic...baller!) In this section we will talk about Banner Ads, you have seen these ads often on YouTube 

There are two types of these ads. The Standard banner ads which appear to the side and the InVideo (pictures below) ads those appear on the bottom of the video while a customer is watching.  

These ads are great for small businesses, which can geographically and demographically target users.  The business can target the ads very specifically, for example let say you own a Hipster Glasses Co. in Salt Lake City, UT. Assuming hipsters aren't too cool to watch YouTube from their organically made MacBooks, you can target 18-30 year old in the Salt Lake Area who have interest in social reform and the Indie Music.

Another, more relevant, example is if you are a personal trainer and you want to target people in the area that are looking up exercise videos and proper form. These ads will work well for this purpose, you can target the videos people watching and hopefully  

 You can also limit your budget on how much you are willing to pay per ad and how many impressions you want. These are measured by ad imprecision and click through rates, the measurement are reported through YouTube analytics.  Again these ad vehicles are best used to target your business and reduce your ad budget, since youtube ads are not as over-saturated as Google AdWords, you can get a better return on your advertising dollars and create more compelling ad campaign for your local business.

The characteristics of InVideo ads is that these ads 480x70 and they can have a link to another video that can advertise your business and tell the customer a bit more about what you do. The Standard  Banner ad 350x250 and can have outside links and animation but no sound. While Standard Banner ads are not as visible as the InVideo ads, they are a great compliment to them.  

This concludes the section of the Display ads, in the next section we will cover streamings Ads and how they can help your business further evolve.

1. http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2012/11/27/youtube-advertising

2. http://www.businessinsider.com/youtube-charges-375k-per-day-for-home-page-masthead-ads-plus-other-fun-facts-2011-1

3.http://support.google.com/youtube/bin/static.py?hl=en&topic=30072&guide=30071&page=guide.cs&answer=187101

4. http://www.youtube.com/yt/advertise/targeting.html

5. http://www.youtube.com/t/press_statistics

6. http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2169740/YouTube-Advertising-Options-for-Budgets-of-All-Sizes

Facebook’s Web Analytics Tools and Others

When thinking about advertising on Facebook and analyzing your data from your company page it is easy to get lost in the massive amount of research support tools available. While there is an “Insights” link businesses can use on the Facebook website directly, there does not appear to be a limit to the number of companies willing to either do this analysis for you or to make it easier and more efficient.

Similar to the virtually unlimited number of businesses out there promising easy-to-use tax reporting software created behind the complicated tax reporting requirements of the IRS, Facebook has caused a gigantic support industry to be created to support all the many business needing to analyze their Facebook fan page data.

Before looking at some of the many vendors out there wanting to help with the analysis, here are some details on what companies can find directly on the Facebook website. Here is the path for business owners and advertisers on Facebook to find this info for a fan page they currently have:

Your company profile page >> Insights –All page insights >> Export Data

On the “Insights” initial page, demographics [1] are categorized based on fans who either interact with your company or people who are fans of your page but do not interact with your company. The info here basically gives fan count and age ranges by gender. The reports on the other hand are more helpful and the most helpful report provided is called the daily report under the “Fan and Interaction” heading.

The daily report includes a helpful metric of the number of unsubscribes to get an idea if you might be doing something to either offend or annoy your fan base. This is helpful since you never get this from traditional advertising vehicles. It also includes the number of resubscribes, interactions per comment & likes. In addition, it shows unique page views (only counting the first time a user views your page), Page views per day including, audio, video & photo view metrics per day (The video views metric is just like the YouTube metric but measured on Facebook).

 


"Next Analytics" is just one of many companies that not only specialize in social media analytics for Facebook but for every other major social media site as well. They are a one stop shop for social media analysts. Their products retrieve and analyze data from Google Analytics, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and others.

Another popular outsourcing option for web analytics for social media is "Sprout Social". This company specializes in outsourced social media web analytics and manages over 150 Facebook pages and many Twitter & social networking pages. They provide reports to many major companies nationwide such as Yahoo, Adobe and McDonalds. [2]. 

Here are some basic resources available to smaller companies with limited budgets who want more sophisticated measurements of their performance than what is provided on Facebook:

A company called "Klout" specializes in providing a numerical measurement of social media influence on a 100 point scale based on 400 variables beyond the number of likes or friends your company has.

Another company called "Edge Rank Checker" interestingly enough claims to be able to tell you the best time of the day and day of the week to post on your company page, make recommendations and provide industry reports.

While the tools provided by these companies seem to be able to cover all the web analysts’ bases, this is still the tip of the iceberg in relation to the analytics support industry created all thanks to Facebook. There are many other firms willing to cater to your web analytics needs and many offer multiple price points based on these needs and the size of your business.

References:

[1] http://www.facebook.com/help/118314051609562/
[2] http://sproutsocial.com/

The Facebook Analytics Platform

The Facebook Analytics Platform

Want to know who “liked” or mentioned your company on Facebook? What about where these people are located and other demographics? How about the same info about your competitors? Take a look at “Optimal –the leading social media advertising and analytics platform”.  http://www.optimalsocial.com/

How was your company ranked in the national “Optimal Brand Index” in December 2012 in comparison to your competitors?  What about in June 2012? “Optimal” has all these answers and more. All the key social metrics of brands “liked” and mentioned on Facebook are tracked and ranked on a monthly basis by this company’s proprietary method “calculated using user engagement, popularity and cost of fan reach.”

Interestingly enough, according to the Optimal Brand index of the most “liked” and talked about brands on Facebook, Facebook ranks in the sixth place beneath Macy’s, Subway, Kohls, Coca-Cola and Disney. Take a look at the index online at the link below:

http://www.optimalsocial.com/audience/brandindex/

You will notice that their list of the top 50 major brands are weighted by a combination of factors such as “Engagement” measured as the number of people talking about a company as a percentage of likes. Optimal also uses a global cost per click metric that is updated weekly.

“Optimal” specializes in allowing marketers to not only analyze their Facebook fan base instantly and on an on-going basis, but also the ability to “separate potential customers from window shoppers”.  Managers can track the competition and see how effective their ad campaigns are through Facebook.

The ”Optimal” analytics platform for Facebook includes several components:

•  Audience Matrix
•  Keyword Expander (see 2 minute video demo here:  http://youtu.be/t1NQgwr8yPk )
•  Keyword Explorer
•  Optimal Brand Index

Market Researchers at IBM have stated that there is an increasing trend of companies leaning more toward non-traditional advertising mediums. Avoiding the hard selling techniques and traditional market research methods of the past such as surveys are becoming a constant theme today.

With more and more attention being placed on the increasing number of users of social networking websites like Facebook, Twitter and others, it is no wonder that companies increasingly want to use information about these users to sell their products and services. Because of the wide range of users and popularity of the Facebook website, it has been recognized as a very cost effective resource for marketers across a variety of industries to focus their attention on. 

It’s interesting to see the level of detail “Optimal” can provide for strategic decision making and advanced competitive intelligence all from just using Facebook users. Some people would probably assume that the most anyone would ever dream of trying to do with research data from Facebook is simply monitoring the number of times a company Is “liked”. 

Sources

https://www.optimalsocial.com/

Social Media Analytics: Channeling the Power of the Blogosphere for Marketing Insight

http://researcher.watson.ibm.com/researcher/files/us-kclang/sma-win09.pdf

Optimal Releases Latest Version Of Social Media Advertising optimization and Social Analytics Suite

http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/optimal-releases-latest-version-social-media-advertising-optimization-social-analytics-1740740.htm