SOCIAL LISTENING AND KPI MEASUREMENT Key Tips for Brands to Drive Their Social Media Performance

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1 SOCIAL LISTENING AND KPI MEASUREMENT Key Tips for Brands to Drive Their Social Media Performance With social media marketing, the power is derived from being able to directly communicate with consumers showing an active interest in your brand. Using a Facebook fan page is a great way to interact with users in a place where they spend a large portion of their time. Businesses who do not currently have a social media presence should revise their business strategy to incorporate social media marketing. Whether you re a large corporation, a small business owner, or a free lance consultant social media is an excellent communication channel to engage customers in a profitable and efficient manner. By examining social media data provided via social monitoring sites, companies can analyze trends, improve product development, resolve customer service issues, and monitor competitors. Measuring your company s growth is crucial for benchmarking your social performance to your competitors, and can help track your company s social success over time. This whitepaper explains the growth of social media and why tracking and monitoring social data is important for brands who want to increase the effectiveness of their social media marketing. A BRIEF HISTORY: In today s world, most of us could not imagine how to catch up and interact with friends, family, colleagues, and contacts without social media. Social networking has become an essential part of millions of peoples lives and there are many different types of platforms to interact on. With social networking platforms like Facebook and Twitter, people throughout the world have the capacity to communicate publicly in real time unlike any previous communication channel. Facebook launched in 2004 with the intent of connecting college students in the United States. Mark Zuckerberg created the website exclusively for Harvard students, requiring new users to obtain an invite in order to create a Facebook account. In 2006, the website changed from a campus-only networking site to a website accessible to the public. By 2008, Facebook surpassed MySpace and Friendster as the leading social networking platform. As of May 2012, Facebook had over 900 million members globally.

2 Similar to Facebook, Twitter is a social networking platform created in 2006 to allow users to microblog. With over 500 million users, Twitter users can share ideas with a short status known as a tweet. Additionally, Twitter users can re-share ideas by retweeting other Twitter users tweets. Similar in its mass appeal, YouTube is a video sharing website that launched in YouTube reported that the site went from receiving more than 3 billion views per day in May 2011 to over 4 billion videos streamed per day by January Correlating positively with social media users spending increased amounts of time on social networking platforms, brands began using these websites as marketing tools to advertise and communicate with audiences that they previously been unable to connect with. MEASURING SOCIAL MEDIA Similar to the growth of registered social media users, the amount of capital invested in social media marketing has also increased. The table provided by Forrester Research and TWI Surveys, Inc. shows the steady growth in fiscal spending from and the projected future growth. As depicted above, the largest annual increase in marketing strategies has been in social media. As companies spend an augmented amount of money towards social media, it has become more critical for brands to track their social marketing performance. Social media analytics platforms monitor and measure brands social media pages in order to determine the social return on investment (ROI). Social listening and key performance indicators (KPIs) are two types of analysis, which provide quantitative and qualitative feedback so a company can monitor their social media performance. Quantitative data helps brands monitor their traffic (number of fans or mentions), click through rates, SEO rankings, etc. Qualitative data helps brands measure their reputation (positive engagement rates, likes, positive comments on Facebook, etc.), track competitor analysis, create meaningful brand-customer relationships and more.

3 SOCIAL LISTENING Social media listening allows companies to monitor discussions about their company without having to manually collect data about what consumers are saying about their brand or product on social networks. Social listening is the process of continuously retaining real-time data relating to your company, your products, your company s competitors, or perhaps even potential customers. With social listening, the key benefit lies in listening to real-time user comments that may require immediate response by your social customer service team. Companies can choose from many social listening platforms, which searches keywords or criteria you specify, such as your brand name or product. The data gathered is arranged by relevant articles, messages, comments, and information on the social network that a company chooses to monitor. Some of the benefits of social listening include determining the social network your audience uses most often, the general sentiment about your company, or even the general sentiment of your competition. Social listening provides qualitative metrics (such as sentiment of a conversation) and quantitative metrics (such as volume of conversation) to help create the best strategy for your company s social marketing campaign. SOCIAL LISTENING FOR CRISIS MANAGEMENT A prime example of why monitoring social customer conversations is crucial to companies, is exemplified when analyzing the United Airlines incident. Dave Carroll, a distraught United customer, produced 3 YouTube videos after his guitar was damaged in flight and he received an unsatisfactory response from United s customer service team. The videos generated over 2.5 million views, created negative comments on United Airlines YouTube channel, received over 10,000 comments, produced thousands of negative tweets, and reduced the company share by 10% (roughly 180 million dollars). This story illustrates that in order to protect your company s reputation, you should make sure to monitor what consumers are saying about your company and try to respond to them quickly. This could save you from having to deal with a costly crisis that damages your brand s reputation. Tracking customer service on social media pages, offers customers technical support and helps resolve issues quickly and efficiently. Social listening also provides customer feedback for future product development and improves companies overall customer service strategy. MEASURING KPIS (Fan Growth, Response Rate, Engagement Rate) Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are metrics used to evaluate a page over a specific period of time. Analyzing KPIs are useful for determining the success of social marketing campaigns or promotions. By selecting pre-campaign and post-campaign dates, critical analysis of KPIs will allow you to see the overall effectiveness of your social media campaigns. Measuring KPIs provides specific quantified metrics that help you make informed decisions for your company s social success. In addition, KPIs produce qualitative data to help analyze industry trends in social media. An important use case for measuring KPIs is for companies to improve future products by analyzing customer feedback expressed in social media. In the past, gathering this data meant funding focus groups, which is a costly and less objective way of obtaining valuable consumer insights. With social listening, companies can better understand consumer demands in their industry and region, and can better develop products to target these demands.

4 HOW WILL MEASURING KPIs HELP MY COMPANY? Social media created a power shift from the brand to the consumer. Social media for brands and businesses opened a line of communication with its customers that never before existed. With social media companies can better understand their audience, develop relationships, and strengthen consumer loyalty. Not only do companies benefit from having a social media presence, but their consumers benefit as well. FAN GROWTH The most important KPIs your company should monitor are fan growth rates, engagement rates, and response rates. Having a large number of fans is a solid measurement of your company s social marketing success. Fan growth helps track the increase in the number of fans or followers of your page, but it does not necessarily determine whether your social efforts are effectively engaging your target audience. ENGAGEMENT Engagement is one of the most important indicators of your company s social media effectiveness. The engagement rate for Facebook is calculated as the sum of likes, comments, and shares on a given day divided by the number of posts that a page made on that day. That number is then divided by the total number of fans that like that page. By focusing on creating high quality posts that interest your audience, a page will see an increase in their engagement rate. A recent Mashable article explained the more highly engaged your followers and fans are, the more likely they are to be brand-loyalists, or become influencers and evangelize your products or services on their own personal networks. A high level of engagement shows companies their consumers are listening, sharing, and responding to the content your company is producing. Moreover, the more likely your customers are engaging with your company on social media, the more likely they are to spread the word about the product to others outside of the social media realm.

5 RESPONSE RATE When companies track customer conversations over time they are able to create predictable models for future success. Response Rate (RR) and Response Time (RT) are key metrics for companies to monitor. The Response Rate is a percentage calculated as the number of times the page responds to user posts or questions on their page, divided by the total number of posts or questions. Your goal is to have a high RR in order to show customers that you are actively listening and responding. Response Time is the average time a company takes to respond to a customer question or post. A company wants this number to be low so that customers feel as though they are valued by the company. GATHERING COMPETETIVE INSIGHTS For every social media platform you are using, you should measure your competitor s performance as well. By analyzing both social listening and KPIs, companies can compare trends across different social media platforms and understand the effectiveness of competitors on social media. By using social listening companies can measure the social reach of competitors, see the type of sentiment about their competitor s reputation, follow successful trends their competitors are using, or analyze the success of a competitor s new product. Most importantly, competitor feedback should be used as valuable insight for improving the future product or service development of your own company. For example, if customers are complaining to a competitor about a product that is lacking a specific feature, your company may be able to release a similar product with these improved features. Or perhaps if customers are complaining about a service the company does not provide, your company may be able to benefit from providing that service which will lure new customers to your brand. With social listening, you are able to see where and what your competitor s customers are talking about. KPIs like mentions by hour of the day, or mentions by day of the week, can be beneficial for helping your company outperform your competitor socially. For example, determining the hours of the day, and days of the week when engagement rates are highest for your competitors, can help you adjust your posting schedule to boost the number interactions your company receives. CONCLUSION Each year companies are allocating more time and capital in social media marketing. With the growing power consumers have to voice their opinions on social networks, it is in the best interest of a company to use social listening tools to know what individuals are saying about their company and create a social customer management plan. The only way to know if a marketing strategy is effective, is to evaluate quantitative and qualitative data from before and after social media campaigns. Whether a brand is trying to create social brand awareness, advertise on social media, drive social engagement, track competitor s performance, or increase social ROI; social media analytics platforms are advantageous for making use of important KPIs. With the invaluable data collected from social listening and analytical KPI reporting, companies are better able to drive their social media performance and maximize the effectiveness of their social media efforts. Further questions? Please do not hesitate to contact us! You can reach our Social Media Expert team at experts@socialbakers.com