Conversation analysis is the process of analyzing conversations on social media surrounding topics like brands, products, or industries. There are four key categories to analyze: volume, influence, relevance, and sentiment. Volume looks at metrics like unique people, mentions, reach, and impressions. Influence identifies influential participants and content. Relevance determines how related conversations are. Sentiment gauges positive and negative reactions. Understanding conversations in these areas helps inform social media strategies.

1. The Complete Guide to
on Social Media
CONVERSATION ANALYSIS

2. #SocialAnalytics2
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction 1
Analyzing Volume 3
Unique People 4
Mentions 4
Potential Reach 5
Potential Impressions 5
Analyzing Influence 7
Audience Characteristics
Most Active Participants
Most Influential Participants 9
Most Influential Content 10
Analyzing Relevance 11
Analyzing Sentiment 12
Conclusion 13
The Complete Guide to Conversation Analysis on Social
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3. The Complete Guide to Conversation Analysis on Social #SocialAnalytics1
Introduction
Social media has changed the way we interact with each other,
creating public forums for all of our digital conversations. As
marketers, the data available from these conversation presents
an incredible level of visibility into our audience and what they’re
talking about, but where do you start? And how do you hear
through all the noise?
The process of identifying and breaking down conversations into
something usable is tricky. In social marketing, this is known as
conversation analysis.
Conversation analysis is the process of identifying and
understanding conversations surrounding a brand, specific
topics, or any selected area of interest.
Conversation analysis can help frame the way you understand your
social ecosystem, the way you speak about your own products and
brand, how you interact with consumers by leveraging the topics
that are already being discussed, and your understanding of what
tactics and conversations to avoid altogether.

4. The Complete Guide to Conversation Analysis on Social #SocialAnalytics2
As a part of the social analytics framework, conversation
analysis supports the planning process, and fuels tactical
execution of campaigns and engagement programs.
In the end, conversation analysis works in conjunction with
competitive and audience analysis to comprise a complete
social planning process, allowing marketers to establish an
informed social strategy.
When conducting a conversation analysis, there are four
specific categories that can help you gain insight:
• Volume
• Influence
• Relevance
• Sentiment
This guide will help you walk through best practices from
each of these four categories and how you can use them to
drive value and insight from your conversation analysis.

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Analyzing Volume: Determining Interest and Impact
Conversation analysis arms marketers with the ability to
understand the impact of, and interest in, specific topics like
their industry, product, or sometimes even their brand name
or branded terms. Understanding interest and impact equates
to understanding the volume of mentions and reach of a
specific term, and can then be applied to analyzing influence,
sentiment, and relevance.
When analyzing the volume of a specific term, think of your
measurement in terms of a megaphone, with the initial
conversation being projected to a broader audience. The
metrics fall into place in that context.
Unique People
How many people are using your selected terms?
Mentions
How many times are your selected terms being used?
Potential Reach
How many unique people are being exposed to your
selected terms?
Potential Impressions
How many times are your selected terms showing up in all
users’ feeds?

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Unique People
Identifying the unique people involved is an important place to
start. How many people are engaged in a specific conversation
or using your selected terms? The number of people engaging
gives you a starting point for the rest of your analysis, from
mentions, to reach, to potential impressions.
Example: If four people, each of whom have five followers, use
the term #SocialAnalytics, I have a baseline for measuring their
level of engagement, influence over their followers, and levels
of influence among their respective followers (more on this in
the “potential impressions” section).
This chart from the Simply
Measured Instagram Hashtag
Report shows the volume
of hashtag mentions,
distribution between photos
and videos, and the daily
volume trend.
Number of Mentions
Finding out how many times a term has been used during a
specific time period gives an idea of whether or not there’s
interest in the topic, and how consistent that interest is. By
analyzing the volume and frequency of mentions, we get a
good gauge of interest in that specific topic.
Example: If 20 people use the hashtag #SocialAnalytics, I
can then compare that conversation to hashtags I’ve used,
competitor hashtags, and the volume of other relevant topics.

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Potential Reach
By identifying the total number of people reached via your
specified conversation, you can make better decisions about
your brand’s involvement.
Example: Reach is a metric that has been around in traditional
advertising and marketing for years. For example, if you place
a billboard on the side of the highway, and 1,000 cars pass on
average each day, your potential reach is 1,000 people. The
same is true in social media. If the hashtag #SocialAnalytics
is used by two people, and each of those people has 500
followers, that hashtag has potentially reached 1,000 people.
Potential Impressions
An important aspect of conversation analysis, which we’ll dig
into later, is influence. Measuring potential impressions can be
an important metric for analyzing the influence of the people
engaged in a specific conversation. Potential impressions mark
the number of times a term may have been served up to users.
Example: If Joe has one follower and Joe Tweets the
hashtag #SocialAnalytics, that’s one potential impression
because one person potentially saw it in their feed. But if Joe
Tweeted the hashtag twice, that’s two potential impressions.
Now, if Joe has 1,000 followers and tweets twice, it’s 2,000
potential impressions. If Joe’s Tweet is retweeted or his
followers use the #SocialAnalytics hashtag, that number
grows exponentially, especially if those users have large
audiences of their own.
This chart from the Simply Measured Twitter Activity Report shows the
trended potential impressions for a keyword, calling out the impression
peaks and total volume.

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Putting Volume Analysis to Use:
Asking the Right Questions
Unique people, mentions, potential reach, and potential
impressions aren’t the only metrics you can use when analyzing
conversations, but they give a solid foundation to your analysis
and act as valuable tools for benchmarking against competitors,
analyzing period-over-period changes, and conversion rates.
Volume analysis equips us for several
types of benchmarking activities:
• Period-over-Period Benchmarks: How is this
conversation changing over time? Are more people
engaging in this conversation than they did during
a previous period? Have there been more potential
impressions, signifying that more influential people are
getting involved?
• Competitive Benchmarks: Are more people talking
about this or another topic? Which conversation is
trending? Is one gaining steam and another losing it?
• Comparative Benchmarks: How does this conversation,
keyword, or campaign compare to previous
conversations, keywords, or campaigns?
Once the baseline understanding of a conversation’s volume
is set, we can dig into more qualitative analysis.
This graphic from the Simply Measured Instagram Hashtag Report
highlights the conversion metrics all the way from unique people
using a term to potential impressions of that term.

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Analyzing Influence:
Determining a Conversation’s Value
Once your involvement, volume, and amplification (reach and
impression) metrics are in place, you can analyze the influence
of the conversation.
There are four main things to look for when determining
influence:
• Audience Characteristics
• Most Active Participants
• Most Influential Participants
• Most Influential Content

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Audience Characteristics
There are particular characteristics to focus on when gauging
the aggregate influence of conversation participants.
Identify the average audience size of those engaging with your
term to determine the social maturity of the participants, as well
as the potential for increased amplification.
Then, you can use influence scoring platforms like Klout to
measure and benchmark social influence of users engaged.
Most Active Participants
Which users are most involved in the conversation being
reviewed? Knowing who is the most involved with a specific
conversation can be beneficial for targeting purposes, as well
as best practices and insight around the aspects they find the
most compelling.
These charts from the Simply Measured Twitter Activity Report show the
breakdown of follower counts and Klout scores among participants. These
metrics can help you gauge the influence level of a conversation.
This chart from the Simply Measured Twitter Activity Report shows
the most active users associated with a specific conversation, and the
number of times they’ve engaged with a particular term.

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Most Influential Participants
Analyzing the most influential users within a specific conversation
allows you to identify where the biggest impact is being made,
who’s making it, and why they’re making such an impact.
Example: If a specific user has driven 45% of the overall
potential impressions for a selected term, you can dive into the
content they shared, the sentiment around the topic, and the
audience that was exposed to this topic.
Analyze the users who’ve driven the largest number of
impressions, as well as the users who have the largest
audience and those that drove the most engagement with
their posts. These users will likely continue to have a big
impact on this conversation, and a lot can be learned from
their tactics and approach.
This chart from the Simply Measured Twitter Activity Report shows the
trended potential impressions for a keyword and the Tweets responsible
for the most potential impressions.
This chart from the Simply Measured Instagram Hashtag Report showcases
the top users engaged with a hashtag based on their audience size, as well
as the engagement on their posts within that specific conversation.

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Most Engaging Content
One of the easiest ways to understand who is influencing a
conversation topic is to identify the content that has had the
biggest impact. Whose Tweets, posts, or photos are driving
the conversation? What made that content successful as a part
of that conversation? It’s possible that the user has a massive
audience, which is good to know, but it’s also possible that
they used a tactic you can learn from and leverage within that
conversation. For example, if you find that a user saw a big
impact from including a Vine video or specific term, you can use
that info to inform your strategy.
This table from the Simply Measured Instagram Hashtag Report showcases the top content containing
a specific keyword, ranked by overall engagement or potential impressions.

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Analyzing Relevance
An important category of conversation analysis is relevance.
How relevant is the conversation to my brand, and how
relevant are the individual posts to that conversation?
There are some easy ways to identify and analyze
relevance within a conversation. Chief among them is
keyword analysis: looking at the conversations within the
conversation, such as mentions of a specific product while
analyzing a broader industry.
Other types of measurement could include analysis
of participants in the conversation to understand the
demographic breakdown behind a specific topic, or
characteristics of the top performing content, like caption
length, content type, etc.
Example: If I’m looking at the the term #SocialAnalytics
and I analyze the profiles of participants, I’m able to identify
whether the people using the term work in social media or
are irrelevant users and bots that I should avoid analyzing
further.
This chart from the Simply Measured Twitter Activity Report shows the
most frequent keywords within a specific conversation.

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Analyzing Sentiment
In addition to relevance, it’s important to understand the
sentiment around a specific topic or conversation. By analyzing
which content drives a positive reaction versus a negative
reaction, we’re able to zero in on the position of the audience
involved, the overall feeling around the topic, and the specific
components that evoke an emotional reaction.
Example: If I look at the sentiment around the hashtag
#SocialAnalytics and find that, when discussing engagement,
the reaction is generally positive but, when discussing
conversation analysis, the sentiment is negative. I’m able to use
that insight to develop an action program, like writing a guide
that speaks to conversation analysis, hypothetically.
This chart from the Simply Measured Twitter Activity Report with Sentiment
shows the trended negative and positive sentiment for a specific topic,
including the content with the most positive and negative impressions.

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Conclusion
While there are many ways to analyze conversations on social
media, there are four key categories of analysis to focus on:
• Volume
• Influence
• Relevance
• Sentiment
With these four categories in mind, we’re able to analyze what
people are talking about, who’s talking about it, why they’re
talking about it, and how they’re talking about it.
By combining conversation analysis with both audience and
competitive analysis, we have the foundation for a thorough social
planning process, and a complete social marketing strategy.
Kevin Shively - Senior Content
Marketing Manager - Kevin is a
member of Simply Measured’s
content team and the editor of the
award-winning Simply Measured
blog. In his free time, he likes to
remind people that Forrest Whitaker
once called him “pretty funny.”

16. Social Analytics Framework
How Conversation Analysis Fits In
Our social analytics framework below highlights the essential components of the process that enables marketers to plan and
measure their social programs. Conversation analysis fits into the planning process, allowing marketers to understand trends
and topics that are relevant to their brand, who’s involved, and where those conversations are occurring.

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