Focus on social insights, not numbers

Thanks to the social media, businesses are now relying on the social channels besides the mainstream media. Apart from having a web presence, companies are now having their presence on social and professional networks. Because of this, there are more networks, more people and more content getting shared. As highlighted in my earlier posts, social business is not an option for organisations now. Businesses have now acquired thousands of followers, friends and fans on the social networks. But these numbers fail to indicate the true success of a social business. What then are the true indicators for the progress in a social business journey? Our Social Business Maturity Model helps! With the Key Progress Indicators (KPIs), you can easily assess the progress and measure your success. In this post, let us look at these KPIs and how they offer insights into the social business performance.

Measures and metrics in mainstream media

I would prefer to call traditional, digital and online media together as mainstream media. These incude print channels such as magazines,newspapers, electronic media including television and radio, web channels like web sites and web applications. As the saying goes, “measure it to manage it”, people have been measuring the progress of the effectiveness using these mainstream media. Measures and metrics like sales per region and ROI have become standard across industries. However, going by the current trends, their usage is limited and cannot be relied upon to judge the impact across all channels of the business. The following are some of the popular numbers, which are still helpful to get some understanding about the performance on the specific channels.

• Sales per region – all
• Number of impressions – newspapers and magazines
• Number of footfalls – Physical stores and shops
• TRPs – Television
• Conversion rates – Web sites
• Page views – Web sites

Social media brings new measures for businesses

Besides the above, social businesses now have newer measures added to manage, track and measure the social efforts. Since social networks are mainly focused on people and content aspects, businesses are engaged in connecting and following people and viewing, sharing and creating content. Alongside these activities, advertisements in Facebook, YouTube etc., help businesses generate leads and enable online transactions, smoothly. In line with the activities and social engagements, the newer social measures and metrics emerged that would help track these activities. These ranged from the simple measures like number of followers to more complex metrics like influence score and engagement score. However, these numbers alone are not helpful to see the activities on social networks and the results therefrom, in silos. They are not of much use in getting the big picture for social business. Our Social Business Maturity Model and the associated KPIs surely give a better visibility on the activities and results.

Social measures, metrics and analytics

According to the Social Business Maturity Model, there are 3 key areas that offer insight into how the social efforts are performing. These are the people, content and business. Within each of these 3 areas, there are measures, analytics and social business insights. The measures add up to the metrics and they in turn contribute to generate the usable insights.

• Social measures
• Metrics and analytics
• Social business insights

Social measures are pure numbers that are straightforward and do not depend on other measures. These are expressed typically in numbers, averages and time taken to perform an action. Examples for social measures are number of followers, views, likes, shares, votes etc. Metrics and analytics, on the other hand are derived from the social measures.  For instance, influence score, engagement score and network reach are some of the popular analytics that we track and analyse for understanding the user behaviours, content quality and campaign’s performance. Social business insight is the overarching measure that would help understand the effectiveness of a campaign or series of activities on the social networks. Total value per action, for example is one such social business insight that is derived from the metrics and analytics.

Social Business KPIs

In the Social Business Maturity Model, the Social Business KPIs offer the true insights about the performance, progress and success of the social business efforts. While most of them are quantitative, a few of them are based on the qualitative aspects. These are derived from the social metrics and analytics. And metrics in turn, are computed based the social measures. A case in point is the analytic ‘network reach’ is dependent on the social measures – no. of followers in the networks, no. of new followers added in the last week, no. of FoF (friends of friends) etc. This analytic network reach however is not complete in itself and cannot be a great business value. So, we have a KPI called Total Value per Action (TVA) which is derived from other related analytics like the influence score, engagement score, number of leads generated from the advertisement, number of transactions triggered etc.

The following diagram shows how an insight, total value per action, is derived from the associated metrics and social measures.

Hope you find this post on the social business insights helpful. Please feel free to drop your comments and feedback. Until next post, ciao!