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 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.

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.

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

• Interactions (Absolute Engagement)
• Engagement Rate
• Audience Size
• Shareability
• Response Rates

Private Metrics Include

• 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

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.

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 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 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 the potential to boost your Reach is huge. At present 17% of all Facebook posts are being boosted, and we believe this is only going to grow in 2015 – highlighting the importance of post boosting.

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.

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.

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.

Benchmarking and competitive analysis helps to...

Quickly identify what KPIs need to be improved

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.

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 socia

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.

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.