An Approach to Measuring Social Content and Communities

November 21, 2011

Varun Gambhir

In this Presentation

• Background

• Why measure

• Proposed framework

• Insights and Learning's

• Your Thoughts

• Annexure

Background

• We’re increasingly beginning to create richer content for clients, especially for online and social media application

• These may range from short videos, info graphics, to other image, video or sound content

• While the existing measurements vary as per the content produced and the client, there exists no available framework to measure and attach an RoI to the content we create

• This could be considered the same for social media on a whole, and the following measurement framework can be tweaked and used for online communities as well, if agreeable to the team and client

Why measure?

• By tracking the return on investment for the content we produce or the communities we manage, comparable to others forms of media, we were able to:

– Better validate our work, value and creative concepts

– Showcase how it / we mostly outperform other forms of media with larger community size (looking at the RoI)

– Marketing managers have the ability to measure social head on with other forms of media

Proposed Framework

• By linking the measurements available for social, to that of digital advertising, we’re able to arrive at an RoI for our content and communities

• Essentially, we’re tracking as many social actions as relevant to the client (or we make relevant for the client) – and draw their digital advertising equivalents

Proposed Measurement Framework

Measurement Ad Eq Value Basis

FB Impressions + Tab Page Views

100 impressions =

Rs. 2

What you’d expect to pay per 100 impressions on a reasonably popular website for the key cities as

your social community population

Facebook Post Viewers (Includes FB Likes, Comments and Shares)

Rs 1 – View

Expected cost per SMS read when undertaking a mobile marketing campaign

Image Views Rs. 2 – View Average cost per view when undertaking email marketing campaigns

FB Page Visitors + FB App Users

Rs.10 per

visitor CPC

What you’d pay Facebook for a click-based ad –

leading traffic back to your website, fan page or app

Video Views

Rs. 2 – View

What you’d pay YouTube per video view

Localized values in consultation with an online advertising professional at Komli Media, APAC’s largest digital media network

Particulars

• For third party impressions, we use tools like Google Double Click Ad planner to arrive at the monthly unique visitors, and divide that by 30 assuming our content was on the front page for a day out of the month

• For RIM we measure clicks on three platforms to best validate which one to use, including bit.ly, using the link shortened on the content mgmt platform (Syncapse's Social Talk) and adding CPIDs (a tracking code for the Omniature website dashboard)

• We look to centralize all videos on YouTube, and publish to different social platforms from there. This helps us centralize the video views to one platform

• Facebook impressions, post views, page visitor and image views can be taken from the insights dashboard

• Can use Crowdbooster to know Twitter impressions & engagement

Insights and learning’s

• When calculating the RoI, you’ll notice most of the return comes from impressions, clicks and views. Engagement parameters like Likes, Comments, Shares, etc don’t individually add up to much (<10%) (they do drive total impressions)

• First exploring the measurement framework around the content we’d created for Facebook, we realized as a rule of thumb, the larger the community, the larger the return. – This helped us arrive at how we should budget for the content we

create. (e.g., if a video published to a fan page get’s 10k views avg, then it’s safe to say a video production budget of $7.5k should be allocated, as the return will support as much investment in richer content)

Your Thoughts

Annexure

Ref Reading

• Virtue study pegging fan value – http://www.vitrue.com/360-facebook-fan-valuation-is-just-the-tip-of-the-iceberg

• AD Week on the Virtue report – http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/value-fan-social-media-360-102063

• Blog report capturing many povs and pointing in the direction of linking the Virtue study to value for FB comments – http://www.clickz.com/clickz/news/1691883/is-a-facebook-fan-really-worth-usd360-social-marketers-debate

• Some valid arguments against the Virtue study – http://www.communicationammo.com/meas/why-vitrues-facebook-fan-value-is-poppycock/

Known arguments and resolution

• While this is a proposed measurement framework to converse around and see how best it can be made applicable to the individual client or need, shared below are the criticisms I found online to the approach and my arguments around them:

– Measurement is based / includes impressions and not how many people ‘saw’ the post – so is the case with most forms of advertising, including television, print, radio, and website banners. All get sold per potential impressions, no guarantee who actually ‘saw’

– In advertising the message is completely controlled, so is not always the case for social media. So how can we value the impressions, engagement, etc the same? – What’s proposed is a framework, and an idea towards making measurement of social content possible. The exact values we assign can be based in agreement

– Isn’t measurement against the idea of social media? – As communicators, we should know the effectiveness of each medium. Even if we don’t look at it from a financial pov, we should know how the media as a whole performs the best we can