Simply Measured

How to measure and learn from your competition in social media.

Competitive analysis and benchmarking should be an important part of your social media measurement and reporting strategies. Each brand has its own strategies, goals, and execution tactics but you all are striving to reach and engage with the same consumer base. When you monitor and measure the effectiveness of campaigns run by other brands the data you gather can help drive your decision making without the expense and risk of trying them all yourself. This does not mean you should simply be a copycat brand, but understanding the competition will help you make informed decisions about your own strategy going forward and measure your own success with market context.

1. Compare Engagement Rates

To understand the impact of engagements rates you need to look at how you stack up against the competition. If you only focus your analysis inwards you may never move the needle in overall standing. By analyzing this data closely you can determine how your brand compares to your competitors which will enable you to pinpoint opportunities for growth, particularly where the competitors out perform you. Then you can identify what types of content other brands are using that is giving them this lift.

In this example we see that @HiltonWorldwide has the highest engagement rate. We also see that their content is predominately comprised of @Replies. Using this data the competition can then adjust their social media strategy to improve their standing and can use these reports to monitor their progress. Pulling this report for each social media channel will help keep you ahead of the curve and expedite how you respond to changes in your marketplace. You can start running reports just like this by using our Facebook Competitive Analysis.

2. Measure Responsiveness Against Market Leaders

Social media moves fast and customers not only expect you to keep up with them but exceed their expectations. In fact, 47% of consumers expect a response to an online request within an hour. How you compare to the standards set by other brands in your industry can play a key role in retaining current customers and growing your business. By analyzing and understanding how your brand ranks within your industry can help set goals for your social media engagement.

In this example we see that @spginsider is setting quite an impressive standard that also meets consumers’ expectations when it comes to responsiveness. With such a high bar, it is important for the competition to take a look at what @spginsider is doing. A deeper look at the data shows, they are responding almost 24/7, and they respond to 37% of tweets.

3. Quantify Your Reach with Market Context

A third factor when analyzing your competitive landscape is understanding how your reach stacks up to competitors. Start off by evaluating both the sizes of your individual social networks as well as your combined social footprint. Now rather than delivering fan and follower data to management, you can report reach and trends in context to your market. And as with engagement rate, use this data to evaluate the tactics the competition uses to expand their reach and decide if any should be incorporated into your own strategies.

Here we can clearly see that Walmart has the largest Facebook footprint. For the other brands listed, the next step is taking a comprehensive look at what kinds of promotions Walmart runs and content they publish to create such an expansive network. One interesting observation is how, over the time period monitored, for everyone except BestBuy, Walmart has significantly more admin posts than the competition. Experimenting with using a similar strategy (though not being a copycat) could prove to be quite beneficial.

4. Measure Your “Share of Voice”

Not only is it important to understand how many people you are conversing with, you should evaluate how big your slice of the conversation is compared to your competitors. Is your brand a hot topic and making up a Yeti-sized slice? Or is there room for improvement? By looking at the competition you can evaluate their effectiveness of their strategies in comparison to yours.

Cheerios is currently leading the way in terms of Share of Voice with Frosted Flakes coming in as a close second. The next step here for any of the brands would be to understand what types of content are people talking about for each brand. Is it focused on promotions about Cheerios or Frosted Flakes? Or perhaps it is recipes for incorporating these beloved brands into other meals. Either way, this insight gives you an advantage as improve upon your content strategy.

5. Dig Deeper with Content Analysis

The final piece to this puzzle is something that has been alluded to throughout the post and answers the question: How does your content stack up? Every industry has its own optimal content. The key here is to stay ahead of the curve and continue to monitor what works best for your industry in each social channel. By going beyond the age-old saying of “Content is King” and optimizing your content mix and the frequency of your content you can position your brand in a top seat. As brands continually work to improve their content mix, valuable data can be garnered just by monitoring how their content performs.

In terms of content, we need to look at the types and engagement. Macy’s and Sears publish a similar amount of content, but Sears outperforms Macy’s in terms of engagement (not pictured here). To take a step further, it is interesting to note that Sears has diversified content mix. They are on the right track when it comes to content strategy and the competition would be wise to find interesting ways of emulating them.

Ready to start comparing your brand to the competition?
Then sign up for a free Simply Measured trial or try one of our free reports, today!

Discovering data & reports with the new look of Simply Measured.

In the wee hours of the night, Simply Measured got a facelift — her laugh lines were starting to get deep and her jowls were a little saggier than she was comfortable with. But fear not data lovers! While things look different, everything you love about Simply Measured is still available, plus we’ve added some exciting new features to make your reporting experience even easier. To help with this transition, we’re going to walk you through the changes so you can get back to analyzing your data! This 90-second video outlines the changes or keep on reading for the full run down!

The New Reports Tab: Easier Navigation to Your Reports

Now that we have over 20 reports, and are continually adding more based on your feedback, we knew we had to improve how reports are organized. With the “Reports” tab it is easier to find the report you need and discover new reports when they become available. We built a marketplace-style layout that makes it easy to find the right report when you need it. Here are the main ways you can navigate through this section:

All Reports: Just like the title says, all reports offered by Simply Measured, ready and waiting for you.

Recent Reports: Need to get back to that last report you were working on, fast? Here are all the reports you have ever run, organized by most recent report.

Scheduled Reports: Can’t remember which reports you have scheduled to run auto-magically? Here is your comprehensive list broken out by day of week the reports are scheduled to run. You can even make adjustments to your schedule right from here.

Data Type: Quickly access all the reports available for a particular data type – Twitter, Facebook, Google+ or Monitored Keywords. Helping you find the reports that will answer questions such as “How is my brand doing on Twitter” or “What is happening with my brand page on Facebook.”

Report Category: From here the reports are organized by use cases, regardless of data type. Helping you answer questions like “How does my brand engage with our social media followers?” or “How do we stack up against the competition?”

“Dashboards” are Now “Data Collections”

To keep you on your toes we made a little language adjustment. We had these things called “Dashboards” which were a way to group and organize your various data sources. Given the actual functionality of Dashboards, we decided that “Data Collections” was actually a much more appropriate name. It has a nice ring to it, right? None of the functionality has changed here – this is still the place to organize, edit, and review all your collections of data.

Need to add a new data collection? You can do it from right here. You can create Data Collections from a single data source or combine multiple sources into a single collection.

Improved Data Connection Stats:

We’ve gotten rid of the old “Manage Data” tab and streamlined how you can keep track of all your active data sources. We’ve combined what was available in the “Manage Data” tab and integrated it with the “Detailed Stats” to create the “Data Connection Stats.” From here you have a deeper dive into what data you are already collecting and can make adjustments as necessary.

Just like before you can see how you are pacing towards your Total Monthly Volume, Max Audience Members and Max Accounts limits. Now you also have a breakdown of how many Facebook Fan pages and Twitter accounts you are tracking. Both are linked to the complete list of active data sources where you can edit connections as needed.

So jump in, look around and let us know what you think. If you have trouble finding something please don’t hesitate to reach out to your account manager, comment below, Tweet about it, Facebook about it, but please, no carrier pigeons. They really make a mess of our office!

How to Measure Your Customer Service on Facebook

Recently we launched the Customer Service Impact Report for Twitter that provides metrics for the converging worlds of customer service and marketing. Today we are announcing the launch of the Customer Service Impact Report for Facebook. This report continues down the path of providing data to the departments that are responsible for excellent customer service. This report answers many of the same questions as the Twitter report, but this time from the perspective of your Facebook data.

Let’s walk through the key questions you can answer with this report, using data from the Home Depot Fan Page as a case study.

1. How do you respond?

As with the Twitter report, you can now have a better understanding of how well your brand responds to your fans and determine what opportunities for improvement exist.

You can also benchmark against your goals and find what opportunities to enhance customer satisfaction and brand reputation by continuing to improve upon how you engage with your customers when they engage with you.

2. When are you reacting to and engaging with Facebook activity?

It is also important to understand when you are responding to activity on your page. Do you take a long time to respond or do you promptly engage back? Do your findings align with your social media strategy? With this data you will be able to answer these questions, find areas for improvement and track your success going forward.

3. How much are you engaging with your fans?

You also need to know how deeply you are engaging with your fans. Do you respond once and consider it done? Or perhaps you are getting into full conversations with your fans. From this report you can monitor what is happening and determine if you need to adjust your strategy.

Just like with the Twitter version, you can run this report for your competitor’s Facebook page. This gives you the chance to see how you perform against each other and determine if they are setting different standards than you. All of which can help you set your customer service strategies and goals going forward.

Want to try it out for yourself? If you’re a Simply Measured customer, just log in to your account and it will be available for any of your Facebook dashboards. Not a Simply Measured customer yet? Then sign up for a Free Trial today!

Another day, another CES update! *Please note, we’ve added the day 4 (final) charts to the bottom of this post!

Excitement for Motorola’s announcements from earlier in the week continues. They are also receiving increased attention due to a CES contest being run by @NextIssue where the prize is a Motorola Xoom.

Tablets and gaming have both surpassed ultrabooks as the hot topics of the show. And while it’s losing momentum, OLED is hanging on to the number one spot.

We’re starting to feel a little bit like a broken record here, but the trends established early on in the show have remained through day 3. News and interactive media continue to be the top tweeted domains.

Volumes continue to be higher, but the timing of 2012 tweets map directly to 2011.

Want access to Twitter Analytics so you can make charts like these?

Sign up for a free trial of Simply Measured.

**Updated: Here are the charts through day 4**

The numbers are in for social activity for day 2 of CES!

Microsoft is still holding on to the number one spot, but Motorola saw a nice increase due to their announcement of Intel-based phones and tablets.

While OLED continues to be the hot topic, tablets have surpassed ultrabooks in terms of mentions.

Again, we see the top tweeted domains continue to be news organizations and interactive media.

2012 data continues to pace with 2011!

Want access to  Twitter Analytics so you can make charts like these?

Sign up for a free trial of Simply Measured.

Good news data junkies, we’re tracking the social-side of CES and have some interesting data to share!

With some strong engagement after Steve Ballmer’s Keynote address, Microsoft is leading the way in terms of interactions. But Qualcomm was the big gainer in Day 1 as excitement spread during their keynote.

Unsurprisingly, the most popular topics are OLEDs and Ultrabooks. As more announcements are made, we will be watching this closely to see if the trend changes.

When we look at the top links from the #CES stream we see that most of the sharing is centered around news and photos/videos. CNET, Mashable and Engadget lead the charge in terms of news, and Instragram, yfrog, twitpic, and twitter.com lead the way in the photo and video category.

Overall, Twitter volume is slightly higher in 2012 than 2011. This could be reflective of a variety of things (Twitter’s growth, penetration within the tech crowd) and is something we will monitor through the event.

Want access to Twitter analytics so you can build reports like these? Then sign up for a free Simply Measured trial!

What Happened Online with the 2011 Holiday Shopping Season?

The 2011 Holiday Shopping Showdown has come to a close and it has definitely been an exciting season! Early reports show that total retail sales are expected to be approximately $468B, up 3.8% from 2010. Online sales were key to this growth, increasing 15% from 2010 to $35.5B. And as this battle gets fought online, social media has become a key part of the Holiday Shopping push for many retailers.

Tracking Facebook Fan Page analytics during the Holiday Shopping season, we saw a huge amount of growth for top retailers. The retailers we tracked added a combined total of 4.7MM new followers, increasing their total fan bases by 12%. When it comes to engagement, there were 2.53MM fan interactions, amounting to 5.7% of the fan base! That’s a lot of engagement.

Holiday Season Catch-Up

When we last checked in, Macy’s was leading the charge in terms of engagement, Staples had the largest percentage of fan growth, and Target had the biggest volume increase in number of fans. As we entered into the final days of the season, we were curious to see if Staples and Target could find ways to maximize the return on their fan growth, by improving their engagement rates.

Who did it “right?”

Across the board we saw a many different strategies from each of the retailers, some that paid off, some that left room for improvement, and all of which show some interesting trends.

When we look at percent increase in fans, Staples is the clear leader with a total increase of 64%. At the start of the season we saw that they did require you to like their page to get access to exclusive deals. Over the course of the showdown they also ran a variety of promotions, from a “Tech-a-Day Giveaway” to the “Worst Gift Ever” promo that encouraged you to engage with your Facebook friends. All of which helped result in this great increase in fans.

Also, it’s important to call out that Target added the largest volume of fans with 1.6MM. They also took the approach of posting about contests but even more interesting is how they pushed the “like our page for exclusive deals” message throughout the Holiday Season, not just at the start.

Taking the top 5 fan gainers and looking at engagement rates, we see that Macy’s takes the top spot. Over the course of the season they continually executed a variety of promotions that ranged from simple likes to a post (one even got almost 70,000 likes) to posting and sharing recipes. This strategy paid off as they were able to surpass the other retailers’ engagement rates as well as increase their number of fans by 31%.  They also encouraged you to like their page to gain access to special promotions and deals. This is interesting to note as sometimes brands worry that pushing people to like your page to get access to special promotions can be a deterrent. As we can see here, this is not necessarily the case. In fact, all of the top five brands listed above required you to like for exclusive access. For this time period, Macy’s was the best at capitalizing on all their fans.

And the winner is…!

Based on the social media data above, the winner is Macy’s. Their strategy of driving fan growth and maximizing their interactions with their fans clearly paid off this Holiday Season. And while it’s too early to see if this resulted in the ultimate win (sales) the numbers are stacked in their favor.

The fun isn’t over yet! As an added bonus we’re going to continue to follow these retailers. We will be using the suite of Simply Measured reports to see how these retailers continue to stack up against each other from a variety of perspectives.

Have a retailer you’d like to see added to this list? Let us know in the comments below!

Have a question about how we can help you pull reports like these?  Email us (us (at)simplymeasured.com) and we’d be glad to help you get started.

The social media battle continues on between the top retailers in the Online Holiday Shopping Showdown — things are starting to heat up!

Catch up with our previous Holiday Shopping Showdown posts: Part I and Part II.

First off, as you can see above, Staples is leading the way in fan growth percentage. From the days leading up to Black Friday through December 19th they have increased fans over 55% by adding 108,000 fans. They are running a series of promotions where you can enter via Facebook (or Twitter) and based on the numbers above, it is definitely paying off for them.

Secondly, Target has gained the largest volume of fans by adding 1.4MM fans since the days leading up to Black Friday. In contrast to Staples, they have not been pushing contests, but rather polling their followers, posting information about sales and generally conversing with their fans. With one exception: on December 14th they encouraged people to “Like” their page for a “sneak peek” at the upcoming deals.

Things get even more interesting when we take the top five retailers from above and look at their engagement. Macy’s is the current leader. They are second overall with an average engagement rate of 1.01%. But they had the largest spike of any of the retailers we are tracking, during the week of 11/27 with an engagement rate of 2.9%. This spike was due to their “post your favorite recipe and enter to win over $1,000 in prizes.” Definitely a success in terms of engagement and plus one point for Macy’s!

On the other hand, for the two pages with the largest fan growth, Target and Staples, their engagement rates haven’t quite kept pace with growth rates. The week Staples gained most of their fans, their engagement rate went down from 1.02% to 0.23%. And Target’s engagement score peaked at 0.73% the week of Black Friday, but every subsequent week has failed to live up to that.

But the war isn’t over yet! Check back in after New Year’s when we do a final round up and declare a winner of the Holiday Shopping Showdown, 2011.

A study of the Interbrand Top 100 Brands, showing Google+ Brand Page Adoption, Brand Investment and Engagement.

You can see the live viewer of all the data below, here.

It has been a little over a month since Google+ made brand pages available. With this launch, brands finally have the opportunity to use this growing social channel to engage with their consumers. Many questions remain about what the future holds for the search giant’s social network. In this analysis we lay out the developing trends for Google+ and provide insight about the key questions brand marketers are looking to answer. We focused our research on the Interbrand Top 100 list and will evaluate the brands and verticals that have already entered the Google+ arena. We have removed Google Inc. from all of our data as they are an outlier in each of our reports. The data for this report comes from Simply Measured Google+ Analytics.

Google+ Brand Page Adoption

Brands are G+ curious!

An impressive 61 out of the top 100 brands have already created a page on Google+. Of those, 31% were launched within the first 24 hours and 63% were up and running within the first week. A handful of the brands have registered their page but have yet to engage with their base. All of which points to the fact that brands are curious to see what Google+ pages can do for their marketing and social strategies. And while it’s too early to predict whether or not this new social channel is going to steal market share from other social networks, brands were clearly eager to stick their toe in and try it out.

Won’t you join my circle?

One way Google+ differentiates itself from the competition is how users have to make a concerted effort to add a brand page to their circle, before the brand can share updates with the user. By doing this, the user has more control of the information in their stream but it also limits how information is passed from brands to circlers. However, this might be slightly too restrictive as only 21% of pages had circler counts (which can be equated to Facebook page fans) over 5,000. When it comes to circle size, there is no one type of industry or vertical that dominates the top 10 list at this time as the stand-out early adopter brands come from a range of different verticals . In addition, there is a high concentration of “share” at the top – with the top 10 having a combined 5x larger audience on Google+ than the rest of the list. If these early adopters continue to grow, the laggards may find an uphill battle to gain a following comparable to their peers.

Which Brands and Verticals Are Leading the Way?

As marketers attempt to define their strategy with this new outlet, they look towards the early adopters to see who has the strongest potential for dominating the space. In doing so, we can also learn what tactics should (and should not) be emulated. Looking at the top performers from the Interbrand 100, it is interesting to note that the top 15 is comprised of brands from a variety of verticals. No single vertical is completely dominating the space.

When we look at the data from a brand page perspective, Ferrari and Volkswagen are leading the charge with the most brand posts and highest levels of engagement. Engagement doesn’t always follow post volume. For example, H&M is second when it comes to brand posts but 20th when it comes to engagement. This suggests that they have room to improve how they engage their circlers with the content provided.

From a vertical perspective automotive and electronics lead the charge with the highest volume of brand posts and the largest volumes of total circlers.

Google+ Content & Engagement

Optimizing Content to Maximize Engagement

As with any new channel, marketers are eager to jump in and start optimizing their content strategy with hopes of maximizing their engagement rates. With Google+, there was an initial burst of activity on brand pages, but now that the initial wave has settled down, brands are settling in and trying to determine the most effective content strategy.

Despite having comparatively smaller user bases than other social networks, Google+ brand pages are showing incredibly strong engagement relative to their base: 59% of the pages that have activated their page had engagement rates over 10%. And when it comes to content types, the highest volume (68% of total) of content being posted is interactive – photos and videos. This approach seems to be paying off as well – interactive content makes up 70% of the engagement happening on Google+.

Google+ While You Work!

Current trends show that the brands are most frequently posting during regular business hours (5am to 5pm PT). Because of this, it is only natural that consumer engagement follows this trend, which is exactly what is happening. Currently, 85% of the engagement that takes place happens during working hours (5am to 5pm PT) and 91% of all engagement happens on the weekdays. Based on these two data points we can conclude that the primary use of Google+ currently happens at work, not at home.

“Early-Bird” Conclusions

It’s definitely too early to make any sweeping statements about the future of Google+, particularly since it is the holiday season and brands are focusing their attention elsewhere. But overall we can see that there is interest in the network from both brands and users. Brands and consumers are trying to determine how this new channel fits into their strategy and their life. We will be following Google+ adoption and engagement over the next few months and will continue to publish our findings as more information becomes available.

Appendix:

Note: There are two brands not called out in this list as they have activated a page for a business unit (or multiple) but not for the entire organization – they are HP and Microsoft. Also, Google has been removed due to the fact that they were an outlier in every chart.

Metrics for the Converging Worlds of Customer Service and Marketing

Gone are the days when Customer Service and Marketing operated independently. We all know customer service is not just about handling issues and marketing is more than making pretty ads and sending e-mail communications. With the emergence of social channels, consumers have a multitude of ways to engage with the brands they love and vent about poor consumer experiences they have. Furthermore, their expectations are high for engagement on these channels: 86% of those who complained on Twitter expected to hear back from the company. Because of this, the paradigm of how customer service and marketing work together and collaboratively strategize is continually shifting. 26% of brands already say their social strategy lives primarily within customer service and while the top two uses of social media are for marketing initiatives, 75% of brands say customer service is a top use of social media platforms.

Regardless of what team you are on, to map out the right strategy for your brand, you must understand what is actually happening on Twitter. And our latest report, the Twitter Customer Service Analysis, is now here to help you make sense of the data and set your strategy going forward.  Here are the top 4 questions you can answer with this new report:

You can access the live report for all the @HyattConcierge data presented below, here.

1. How do you respond, when they ask for help?

Being able to answer this question is key to knowing what the opportunities for improvement are and you can begin to know exactly how “on top of it” your brand is. Are you quick to respond or slow on the uptake? First you can look at the % of mentions with replies and see how many tweets about you, are you actually responding to.

You can also benchmark yourself against your goals (customizable from Excel) and see how quickly you are responding to mentions of your brand. Opportunities may exist to improve customer satisfaction and brand reputation by finding ways to engage with customers when they are engaging with you.

Another important factor is understanding how quickly you respond to the mentions about you – the more quickly you respond, the more likely you are to turn a negative situation into a positive one.

Since you can run your competition’s Twitter handle through this report as well, you can see how your engagement stacks up against theirs and even realign your goals if they are outperforming you.

2. When are you engaging and reacting to Twitter activity?

Another key indicator for customer satisfaction is understanding if you are living up to the promises you set. Do you say that you provide coverage during particular hours or do you claim to be available 24 hours a day? From here you can see if your execution aligns with the expectations you set. In the example below, standard business hours of 9am to 5pm are called out.  But as we can see, @HyattConcierge provides coverage closer to 24 hours a day.

3. Who are you responding to?

Next up it’s important to understand some of the demographics  of the people you are engaging with.  Your current strategy may dictate that you only respond to people with a certain level of followers, but when you look at this data you may determine an opportunity exists to improve customer satisfaction and your brand reputation by engaging with different segments.

4. What is happening with your brand as a whole on Twitter

After you understand what is happening from a customer service perspective, you can put this in context with everything else that is happening on Twitter — giving you a more holistic picture.

Go ahead, jump on in and try out this latest report.  As always, we love to hear your feedback and look forward learning about how this report helps you understand and build your customer service and brand management strategy on Twitter.