Maybe it’s time to admit, social media can’t be measured
Measuring social media is one of the most important things for brands and marketers to understand, yet it is one of the most difficult to effectively achieve. An issue with a lot of social media measurement tools is that they’ve focused on quantity rather than quality. We have the luxury of many free and paid tools that can tell us the reach through social media, but not so much what that means, or more importantly, the demographic makeup of people that you’re reaching. Comscore are hoping to change that, with their newly launched service ‘Social Essentials’. The tool aims to look beyond the primary factors of a social media campaign, such as the number of mentions or follower on a social platform, into metrics such as the behavioural impact on fans, and demographic comparison to competitors. But can any tool give us the answers we’re looking for through social media marketing?
The problems
Before looking at how effective Social Essentials can be for brands, it’s important to understand the current issues around social media monitoring. One of the biggest hurdles to measuring social media, has been a desire to make new technologies fit into old models. People look for more simple mechanics such as impressions, click throughs , advertising value equivalent in a bid to translate social media activity into a language brands or marketers will understand. In doing so however, the true value of social media activity is limited, as you risk ignoring the other factors that can tell you how your campaign is performing, such as social-specific metrics, influence, sentiment of the conversation and increased brand awareness. To an extent a certain amount can be determined by tools, but manual analysis will always be necessary with social media, as the media itself becomes people – not something that can be measured by a calculation or tool.
Further to this, a recent report by Hypatia Research, found that only 40% of companies surveyed were measuring their social media activity on a quarterly or annual basis, with a further 13% not measuring their activity at all. This shows the huge gap between carrying out social media activity, and understanding how it’s actually working for you. Without this understanding in place, social media activity will only ever do half the job for you, and it will be difficult to justify further spend to increase social media marketing efforts.
About Social Essentials
Social Essentials aims to address these problems, by providing an in-depth social media monitoring tool that goes beyond the numbers, and into real audience data and understanding. As well as looking at metrics such as the true size of the audience you’re reaching through social media, it also looks at the demographic breakdown of this audience and, importantly, the propensity to purchase. Social Essentials also goes one further though, by using analytics and insights to help shape your social media strategy, for example looking at how people are reacting with your content and how branded content can be better optimised on a Facebook Page or other social channel. You can preview the product through a download on the site, showing you how in-depth the insights can get, for example breaking down your targets by primary and secondary reach through social channels.
The only issue with Social Esssentials is that while it’s an in-depth tool and a good new solution, according to Comscore it’s only really suitable for companies with more than 500,000 fans on Facebook. This cuts off the vast majority of brands that use social media, and shows that while it looks promising, the answer for how to measure social media has still not arrived. If you need such a larger userbase for the tool to be relevant, it’s not a universal solution that can be carried across different brands.
Why the answer may never arrive
Though this may not be what marketers or brands are hoping to hear, true social media measurement may never actually arrive, because of the complexities of social media marketing. The difficulty comes with the term ‘media’ specifically, as we’re no longer dealing with ‘media’, rather people as mini publishers or content producers. While you could look at traditional media and assign a value such as total reach or AVE, you can never effectively do this through social media, as every single person you’re engaging with is unique. The platform is social, and herein lies the problem. It is incredibly difficult to design a social media metric or measurement strategy that is easily transferrable across individuals, or that will yield results that actually resemble the reality.
What you can measure
There are of course, metrics within social media that you can measure, and we’re becoming more sophisticated into how these can be applied. What’s becoming easier is to establish the social reach of a campagin, whereby we have tools that can automate this process somewhat, by telling us the primary and secondary reach of individuals and their followers. And within each campaign you can also measure the specific values, such as number of competition entries, video embeds, inbound links etc.. To a certain extent you can also measure the sentiment around a brand, which is an important factor in social media activity. But until the understanding around social media changes, the measurement will never arrive. Quantity is one thing, but the sentiment around the coverage you’re getting is quite another.
What still remains unclear is what these metrics actually mean. 10,000 Likes translates into what? 100,000 video views got me how many sales? 500 retweets resulted in how many clickthroughs? Questions like this are asked by brands every day – it is the ‘so what?’ of social media. The first result may be one thing, but what key business objective is this supporting? Unfortunately for brands, it’s the one metric they want, and the one metric they may never get. Social media has changed the way businesses are marketing, and it will eventually change the way they operate entirely. For companies that have an advanced understanding of social media, an uplift in earned media will be seen as just as important as a product sale, as long as you understand how that earned media fits in the complete consumer journey.
Social media can’t truly be measured, at least yet, because we haven’t sufficiently adapted our understanding of social technologies. Until companies do this, what we measure will continue to be affected by traditional methods, essentially trying to make a square peg fit into a round hole.
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