How to Measure Social Media Brand Management & Competitive …

How to Measure Social Media Brand Management & Competitive …

Even as the use of social media as a marketing strategy matures, the measurement of success for companies in that field continues to be muddy.

Before social media plans and tactics can be rolled out to give brands a foothold in the social media space, a company must first implement social listening. After all, you need to survey the landscape before jumping in to build something on that property, right?

This is the point where businesses will often get tripped up. They’ll use a free social monitoring tool on one social network with a couple of keywords designed to capture general mentions and assume that’s enough. But there’s a wealth of information outside of that one network. It may not even be the right network for you to focus on — how would you know if you’re not looking comprehensively? It’s the advanced social listening that can really drive strategy, and in order to learn from the data you’ve collected, your listening searches have to be set up in a way that allows you to cross-compare data.

Since general brand management and competitive intelligence are the two most common of all social media monitoring programs, I’ll outline the basics for those here. After establishing this as a ground floor, the how-to list below should spur companies to plan their metrics ahead of time so they can glean useful data from social media monitoring and make sure their social campaigns moving forward are poised to take advantage of the insight learned:

Brand Management

What to monitor: Brand names, nicknames, executives – or more specifically: campaign, product, or service keywords.

Who is your target audience? Where are they talking online?
Has your brand gone social? What language are the people talking about you using? Is it your marketing language or are they creating their own? How can you adapt your language to give these people a sense of ownership?
What is the sentiment surrounding your brand/product/service?
What are the hot issues/topics surrounding your brand/product/service?

KPIs & Measurement Opportunities:

Measure the reach of your brand messaging. How many people have you reached on various platforms?
Fans/followers can only get you so far, because not every fan/follower will see every post. Clicks and subscribers show who is reading your content.

More importantly, measure the engagement:

Likes and ratings show who approves/endorses your content.
Retweets and shares show who is spreading your content.
Comments and replies show who is engaging with your content.

Identify the voices, posts, and sites that are influential about your brand, not just your category:

Look for patterns in volume and sentiment spikes.
Evaluate this new insight and alter your marketing plans appropriately.
How does this new information fit with your goals?

Competitive Intelligence

What to monitor: Your brand vs. your competitor’s branded keywords – make sure comparisons are as apples-to-apples as they can be.

Compare Trending Over Time

Find volume and sentiment spikes over time.
Compare your spikes with competitor(s). Are they the same/different? Why?
How can you adapt to take advantage of something that caused a positive spike for your competitor?

KPI: Social Share of Voice

Your brand mentions vs. competitors – but you have to go beyond this metric and look at the trends surrounding this language.

How does this percentage change over time? What is driving these numbers?
Look at the data for your competitors. What strategies are working for them? Are other brands engaging/driving more conversation? How can you build brand awareness to compete more effectively?

Measurement Opportunity: Conversation Analysis

Identify context/causes of volume and sentiment spikes.
Look at the word cloud during the date range of the spike to see what the hot topics/trends were that caused it.
See what themes develop around your competitors.Filter results by the date range of the spike. Then correlate dates with language.
How are your competitors positioning themselves? What language are they using? What markets are they targeting? Evaluate the language, trends coming from your competitors’ advertising and marketing. Is there room for improvement in yours?

Images: blog.now-ic.com

Updated from Monitoring & Measuring Social Media – A Practical Guide

View original post here: 

How to Measure Social Media Brand Management & Competitive …

Share this post