Measuring Social Media for the Distributed Brand

February 29, 2012 by Libby

Analyze and Share Across Your Social Network

Big brands in all industries are increasingly faced with the “distributed brand” conundrum in social media. Altimeter recently reported that the average enterprise has a whopping 178 corporate social media profiles! As a big brand you are responsible for managing, organizing, and cataloging all these disparate channels. But then try to compile all that data across all your social media channels, tell a clear story to management at the corporate level, AND apply those learnings across your organization. Things can become quite complex, quickly. We’ve been tackling this problem with our customers and have highlighted a few measurement approaches that we’ve seen work out.

For this analysis, we are using data for these selected Procter and Gamble Brands.

Take a Comprehensive Snapshot

One of the biggest challenges of measuring a distributed brand is getting an aggregate view of dozens or even hundreds of profiles. This holistic view can be a critical starting point for reporting to management about the overall health of your social network. It also gives you something to benchmark against over time.

Looking at the data below we see that the size of Facebook network is significantly larger than that of Facebook. While this may indicate that P&G consumers are more active on Facebook, it still points to an opportunity for growth on Twitter.

Identify Leaders and Laggards

Once you have detailed data on all your accounts you can create an index for ranking them against each other and ultimately find the leaders and the laggards. From here you can begin to evaluate what works (and doesn’t) and start to apply best practices and learnings throughout your organization.

Looking here we see that Duracell is doing the best at growing their Facebook fan base. However, they are quite a bit lower than some of the other brands at engagement. It would be prudent for them to evaluate what types of content OldSpice and CoverGirl are publishing as they are the leaders in terms of engagement.

When we look at Twitter we see that @Tide is the proving to be the most affective at engaging with their followers. By further analyzing Tide’s strategies, the other brands may find ideas to improve their own engagement scores.

Go Deeper into Content Analysis and Strategy

Once you know who the leaders are on each network, you can take a dive into their practices to determine what drives their success. By understanding specifically what content types and tactics drive engagement, you can share that knowledge and apply those learnings across your organizations.

Continuing with our analysis we see that Old Spice and CoverGirl both publish a good bit of interactive content (photos and videos). Duracell could potentially apply a similar strategy and better capitalize on their fan growth with improved engagement.

When we dig into @Tide, who was identified as a leader in terms of engagement, we see that the majority of their Tweets do not have links in them and they retweet a lot of content. Experimenting with a similar strategy could prove beneficial for some of the laggard brands.

Want to run these types of reports (and whole lot more) for your social media network? Then sign up for a free trial of Simply Measured!

• Posted in Simply Measured, Social Media, Uncategorized