Let’s start small and with something concrete: Let’s do a Facebook report with the most important numbers, which are clearer and say more than those offered by Facebook itself. I think it is important that platform independent figures are used, in order to later make the aggregation and comparison of various activities on other platforms easier. Additionally, we should concentrate on the most important figures, and it has to remain clear and substantial. Detailed analyses can be performed ad hoc when certain key figures result in a great deal of discussion.
Composition of an Activity Report
The following topics should be covered, for example with a Presentation Slide for each. Here it depends on your strategy and activities where you lay the focus and what you leave out:
- Overview: What was done this month and what are our most important figures saying?
- Reach: What is the status of our quantitative and qualitative reach?
- Engagement: What use is reach without engagement? Here you are evaluating the quality of the dialogue.
- Influence: How much influence do I have, for example with opinion leaders?
- Position: What impact have our activities had on my brand position? With which topics am I brought in connection with?
- Protection: Which crises have we avoided or survived? What is the brand perception after the crisis?
- Sales: Which traffic, leads and revenue figures were influence by Facebook posts and Tabs?
- Support & Innovation: How good is our customer service and how do we use the inputs of our users?
- Campaign Analysis: Which impacts did a campaign have, in detail?
- Learnings & Activities Month After: What have we learned from our nice figures and analyses, and what do we want to do better?
I’ve illustrated the most important points in slides. You can download the matching spreadsheet (Microsoft Excel) here. I publish everything under Creative Commons 3.0 BY SA.
Fictional numbers are used in the following examples.
Reach
Of course you can track the fan numbers on your own and your competitors‘ pages manually every month. You can also do this, however, through tools like monitor.wildfireapp.com. The number of impressions is calculated through the total touchpoints of your Facebook content, including those generated through Shares, Likes, etc. On Facebook, this figure is called “Viral Reach”. I additionally calculate the relationship between the number of fans and impressions, and call this active reach. In our example, there were about 5.15 impressions per fan. If this number drops, your Edgerank or something similar has gone down.
Engagement
Who was shown your post and how many reactions (likes, comments, shares, etc.) did it result in? The Feedback Rate is a central figure which rates the quality of your posts. Naturally you can also determine the best days of the week to post through this. The data can be derived directly from the Facebook Statistics page as a CSV download. From there, you simply have to divide Reactions (Facebook calls this “People talking about”) by the number of Unique Impressions (Facebook calls this Reach). Facebook calls this feedback rate “Virality” (in my opinion all very sought-after numbers. Don’t let Facebook confuse you on this).
Influence
In the current case I’ve gone ahead and summarized several topics. Just like with general Social Media monitoring, Share of Voice or on Facebook Share of Liker, is very important. Rate the User posts during your day’s work (Come on, it’s not THAT many). Then you have a trustworthy sentiment analysis. Automatic analyses are not useable. Track your Opinion Leaders and Superfans and include them in events or at least send them a few samples from time to time as a thank-you. Unfortunately Facebook Statistics don’t give us any information on the individual fans. Besides the community manager’s intuition, monitoring tools like Sysomos Heartbeat or Analytics Tools like Socialbakers (Pro) can help analyze a handful of your own Facebook sites. Hints about less price intensive tools are welcome.
Twitter Reporting
Reporting for Twitter can be put together in the same way as that for Facebook. Likes are not relevant; however their place is taken by Retweets and Comments. If you want to go the extra mile, you can weight Retweets and Shares higher than Facebook Likes. This would be correct because the user involvement in this case is higher. Everything is a question of (manual) effort by the user.
An additional analysis that is possible with Twitter is an importance analysis of the fans. Sysomos calls this importance level authority. It is possible that Twitter Account X has less Followers, but a higher overall authority level among users (more influence rich people), than Account Y.
Of course it is possible to measure the relationship between Followers and Following, or the number of “Listed” occurrences as well. I don’t personally find these figures relevant or significant.
Tools
In addition to Facebook insights and spreadsheet programs, Social Media management tools are very helpful. Especially Shoutlet or Vitrue can deliver interesting statistics. Buddymedia is okay. Monitor.wildfireapp.com tracks fan-growth for free. Friends.skyttle.com and facebook.grader.com are tied to costs, but also deliver better insights. I have yet to find a tool that really impresses me. Hints on this topic are also welcome.
Tweetstats.com is practical for analyzing your own Tweet behavior (i.e. time of day, day of week, average number of Tweets in the last months). Klout.com and peerindex.com analyze the importance and influence of your Twitter accounts. Twitalyzer.com and twentyfeet.com deliver more personalized feedback about Twitter performance (“retweet more” etc.), both are Freemium tools. Personally I love to work with Crowdbooster. It’s free for tracking one account and additional Facebook and Twitter Accounts cost a bit extra. Crowdbooster tracks also well the impressions per posts, top retweeters etc.
Please don’t forget to measure the impact of Social Media on your website. You should at least add a section that links to your Social Media presences and 15 to 20 blogs or forums (with high authority) that are important to you.
Webtrends and Omniture are of course top notch tools, but even Google Analytics can do in depth analyses for you. More info about Google Analytics is found in Part 4 of this series.
Have fun setting up your first reports!
This post is a part of the series „Social Media Analytics“. Follow me on Twitter to stay tuned.
- Part 1: Fundamentals
- Part 2: Reporting on Social Media Activities
- Part 3: The Social Media Score Card
- Part 4: Social Media ROI
