Using content analysis to determine what your brand should post.

Posting good content on Facebook is critical to success. But in order to “post good content” you need to understand what works and ultimately drives engagement. By taking a data-driven approach to answer this question, you can optimize your Facebook posts around content that drives the best response.

Here are 6 ways you can analyze the effectiveness of your Facebook content. BTW: all this data is available through our new (and free) Facebook Content Analysis Report.

1. Analyze Your Post Categories

To get started, segment your data by category type; this will highlight the content groupings that provide your brand with the most user engagement. Evaluating this data can help determine where you should concentrate your marketing efforts to further fan engagement. You can also map this data over time to visualize the impact your social media campaigns have on engagement.

2. Take a Deep Dive into Specific Types of Posts

After evaluating the high-level data, you can dive into the details and analyse specific types of posts, such as short vs. long posts, questions vs. links or photos vs. videos. Getting down to this level of granularity provides insight to the specific actions that cause your fans to further engage with your brand.

3. Which Posts Are the Most Effective

Going beyond the categories, we can look at the specific posts that were most effective. This table shows your brand’s top 5 Facebook post for each category. This makes it easy to recognize what works well for each category and incorporate that messaging in the future.

4. Know How Your Fans Engage with Your Content

Understanding the way fans engagement with your content can also help inform your strategy. Does your content get more likes than comments or more shares than likes? What type of engagement is the most important to your brand? If you want to drive up a specific user action, then analyze what content is the most effective toward that result. Perhaps questions generate more comments, but photos generate the most likes – these trends can help you hit goals in the future.

5. What Works When Posting Links

Links tend to be a popular choice to include within a Facebook post. But do you know what domains you link to drive the most interactions? The data will tell you what content sources your fans are most interested in and ultimately helps you tailor the content you share (aka link to) to maximize fan engagement and drive more traffic.

6. What Topics Drive the Most Engagement

Finally, you can evaluate how different keywords drive engagement for your brand. By pinpointing the topics that drive the most engagement you can tailor your future messaging to the areas of most interest for your fans.

Run this report on your own Facebook page!

Ready to more actively engage with Simply Measured? Then sign up for a Free Trial of Simply Measured.

There are possibly a million different KPIs a brand can track in terms of social media. Okay, maybe that’s an exaggeration but with Facebook alone the level of granularity you can get to is enough to make your head spin. Deep analysis on the details definitely has its place. But when reporting on management, finding the right way to cast your performance metrics in context is critical. Otherwise everyone gets lost in the details and loses sight of the story you are trying to tell.

Here are five simple ways to put context behind your data and create more meaningful social media reports, specifically around measuring engagement.

Engagement as a Percent of Audience

Adding up all the user actions available for your social networks (such as mentions, likes, retweets, shares, and clicks) and then dividing that by total audience (Facebook fans + Twitter followers) gives you engagement rate in relationship to audience size. Using this type of context shows how much of your audience is engaged with you and how effectively your programs turn passive fans into active participants.

Total Engagement

Simply adding up all of the components mentioned above and evaluating your total engagement is important as well. By tracking your total engagement over time or continually mapping it against your goals can help translate individual actions into a single engagement metric across all social media channels. Bonus points for tracking over time and mapping to goals all in one chart!

Channel Specific Measurement

You can also break down engagement at the channel specific level to provide additional insight to your reports. Evaluating your data like this makes it easy to compare your social media channels and see how they stack up against each other. Furthermore, it can help determine which of the one million possible KPIs are most important to your brand on each channel.

Weight Your Metrics

Once you determine what KPIs are top priority for your brand, you should adjust their values within the reports. Because what one brand considers a key data point, and ultimately dedicates time and resources towards, can vary greatly for another brand even within in the same industry. By more heavily weighting your most important metrics, you can ensure that your reports accurately reflect the marketing goals and strategies you set.

Engagement With Market Context

To complete the picture for senior management you can put context around your KPIs by comparing them against other brands in your industry. Doing this will validate how realistic your goals are and give you an additional benchmark to track against over time.

What Is Right For My Brand?

The ultimate goal of social media for every marketer is driving a two-way conversation between the brand and its fans. Understanding and measuring engagement is crucial to evaluating that two-way conversation. As we’ve seen in this post there are many different metrics you can use to capture engagement; and there is not a right or wrong way to tell this story. The important thing is to come up with a relevant set of KPIs that make sense for your goals and regularly report back on performance against those KPIs to your organization.

Curious to see if your fans and followers are engaging with you? Then go ahead try one of our Free Social Media reports.

Ready to more actively engage with Simply Measured? Then sign up for a Free Trial of Simply Measured.

It’s one thing to have 100,000 or 1 million fans. But it’s an entirely different thing to report to management that you have 100,000 or 1 million engaged fans or followers. Having this level of understanding is important because it gives context to what your audience size means and how your programs are performing. It also enables you to see what actually gets your fans to engage. There is a lot of talk about engagement, but why is this metric becoming important? Let us provide some insight and help you understand!

The Currency of Social Media is Engagement

Every marketing program has its key metrics. Email has open and click-through rates. Web sites have unique visitors and page views. Social media has engagement rate. By measuring and monitoring engagement rate you can benchmark against your goals, evaluate the effectiveness of social programs, and see how you stack up against your competition.

Looking at this airline example, it’s interesting to note that while all the airlines have similar total engagement levels, both @AmericanAir and @Delta are engaging with a much higher percentage of their followers. Empowered by this data both @JetBlue and @SouthwestAir can change their tactics to reach (or surpass!) the engagement levels set by the competition.

Engagement Helps Indicate Social Media Success

There is a lot of talk about ROI in the social media world – in many cases measuring engagement is at the core of how you measure social media success. In social media, engagement leads to more visibility, sharing, brand affinity, and direct relationships with your customers. It tells you if you’re reaching influencers, advocates, and your target demographic. High engagement also helps you create a bigger network, because the more engaged someone is, the more likely they are share. By engaging you create brand advocates that then spread positive messages about your brand.

Active vs. Passive: Know Where Your Fans Fall

Knowing if your fans are actively engaged or passively watching from the sidelines will indicate if your content is resonating. To evaluate where your fans are at, you can look at overall engagement and see if people care enough to do something with the social content you publish. It is also a great metric to continually check on as your audience size grows to ensure you continue to build deeper connections with fans. Remember, what keeps 100,000 early adopters engaged, might not work when you reach 1 million fans.

From here we can see that fans of the Four Seasons Hotels are engaged. On average the Four Seasons receives 232 likes per post and they engage with 5% of their total base. As they continue to grow, they will need to monitor this metric and make sure it does not decrease. They will also want to remember that it’s not just about quantity but the quality of engagement. Because when audience size and engagement grow in tandem, you can change a fundamental element of your brand’s persona online. As time goes on, evaluating how they perform against the competition and stack up in their industry will be beneficial as well.

Curious to see if your fans and followers are engaging with you? Then go ahead try one of our Free Social Media reports.

Ready to more actively engage with Simply Measured? Then sign up for a Free Trial of 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.