Measure what counts on social

REPORT
Measure What Counts on Social

Smarter Social Marketing www.socialbakers.com
Social media analytics exploded in 2014 - that makes 2015 the year you need to start
using deep social analytics to really start driving business. The major social media
platforms you use to market to your fans and prospective customers continue to make
changes which affect the way your profiles perform. You need to keep up and you need
to engage effectively with your audience across social channels. If you’re not tracking
the competition, benchmarking, and using insights to optimize and iterate your social
strategy you’re Flying Blind.
You’re only “listening” - not using deep analysis to inform your social strategy
Relying only on native social platform tools like Facebook Insights and Twitter Analytics
Ignoring what the competition is up to
Not benchmarking your own activity against the wider market
No social marketer should be Flying Blind in 2015.
Here’s what you need to know to make sure you don’t get stuck in the past.
This guide to social media analytics includes:
1. Why It’s Important to Measure Your Social Success
2. How Social Analytics Works
3. What to Measure on Social Media
4. A Look at Built-in vs. Independent Analytics Platforms
5. The Value of Comparative Analytics
What’s Flying Blind? It means

Social media, in all its forms, is an increasingly important channel for marketers every day. Not long ago, a few
Facebook posts and a tweet here and there would be enough to generate enough fan growth to keep your bosses
happy. Today, every business has to be savvy enough to compete with millions of other businesses for users’
attentions, and keep track of emerging platforms to find out where your Fans “live” online. Brands aren’t just
competing against their direct competition on fans’ News Feeds - they are doing battle with their fans’ friends
and hundreds of other pages, including everything from entertainment, celebrities, and the latest news (Picture 1).
You have to rise above the noise.
Brands are committing more and more budget to social, whether this is for boosting their post Reach, creating
content, and building teams to provide effective social customer care. With a bigger spend, comes more pressure
on performance and effectiveness - you need to show real social ROI. Independent analytics tools add extra
value by allowing you to track core metrics and measuring against the right benchmarks that feed directly into your
marketing goals.
Picture 1. Brands are posting more than ever. The number of posts increased from 7 per month in 2009 to 40 posts per month
in 2014, and is still growing. This seriously increased competition and now people are struggling with organic Reach.
1. Why It’s Important to Measure Your Social Success
In 2009 Only
7 Posts per Month
In 2014
40 Posts per Month

First of all, social analytics are very different from social listening. Where as social listening allows you to
monitor how keywords are discussed across social channels, social analytics measure the performance of many
social profiles in all metrics available. With social analytics you are able to judge your progress in succeeding with
your selected KPIs, both for your own brand and against other profiles and industries.
To get this information, tools like Socialbakers Analytics pull their data from a variety of sources, both public and
private, including API’s from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and more. Once this data is collected it is put through
a number of calculations and formulas. It is also tagged so that it can be visualized in a logical and easy-to-
understand way (Picture 2).
For some platforms, such as Facebook, social analytics tools can show both public and private metrics. Private
metrics are those that are available only to you as the administrator of the profile you are studying, and can’t be
compared to competitors. Public metrics, on the other hand, can be compared to your competition and the wider
industry. This allows you to benchmark performance across public metrics to gain an understanding of where your
performance stands in comparison.
Public Metrics Include
Interactions (Absolute Engagement)
Engagement Rate
Audience Size
Shareability
Response Rates
Private Metrics Include
Organic Reach
Paid Reach
Clickthroughs
Audience Demographics
Reach Engagement
2. How Social Analytics Works
Public API
Restricted API
Insights
Analytics
Socialbakers Community
Crowdsourcing
Analytics Cloud Socialbakers
Analytics
Socialbakers
Free Stats
Socialbakers collects raw social media data from publicly accessible API’s as well as restricted API’s
accessible only to page admins. We store the data in a data cloud, where we process and recalculate
it into the metrics. Thanks to the large and talented community of social media marketers who come
to Socialbakers.com, we are able to categorize social profiles by region and industry and create unique
benchmarks based on their suggested tags.

Once you’ve got your head around measuring your social media activity and how that works, the next key decision
is choosing which metrics to measure on each social media platform. At Socialbakers we advise businesses
in nearly every industry in every corner of the globe on which metrics to prioritize. As with everything, there are
no quick answers in choosing the metrics you should track. What you need to track will ultimately be determined
by your objectives and your social media plan. If you are focused on brand awareness, for instance, the metrics
you choose will naturally be different than if you focus on direct sales.
We believe that social is not about just one metric, but about all of them, and that understanding the whole picture
gives you a greater chance of success.
3. What to Measure on Social Media
On Facebook
Some of the key metrics to measure are
Total Interactions (Absolute Engagement)
Engagement Rate
It is essential to benchmark your performance with these metrics over time. All of the above metrics, with the
exception of Reach (which is accessible only to Page Admins), are public metrics and therefore available for all
your competitors.
Total Interactions
Interactions is an absolute engagement metric. It is the sum of the Likes, Comments, and Shares your post
receives. Measuring this number is valuable for two reasons: First, so you can understand how your Fans interact
with different content from your page; and second, to adjust your content plan to optimize for the interaction types
that are most valuable for your business.
Engagement Rate
Engagement rate is the number of total Interactions drawn by your content, divided by the total audience on your
Facebook Page. It has been strongly affected by the infusion of paid media described above, in the Interactions section.
Reach
Response Rate

Reach
Reach is the number of people who see a given Facebook post. On average around 4-9% of your Facebook fans will
see your posts organically; this is controlled by engagement levels and recency of engagement on a per-user basis.
Remember, Reach is more important than your audience size - these are the people actually seeing your content
in their News Feeds. Measuring your Reach figures and using them to identify when and where to improve your
content strategy is key to achieving social media success. Organic Reach is where users see your content after
liking your page, or because their friends have interacted with you. Paid Reach is where a user sees a boosted
post of yours in their News Feed. Post boosting is becoming massively important for this reason, as the majority
of ads (about 68% in Q4) are moving to News Feed, and the potential to boost your Reach is huge. At present
17% of all Facebook posts are being boosted, and we believe this is only going to grow in 2015 – highlighting
the importance of post boosting.
by
Competitor 1 Competitor 2
Paid 62%
Organic 36%
N/A 2%
Paid 81%
Organic 17%
N/A 2%
Paid 29%
Organic 71%
Data Range: July 1, 2014 - September 30, 2014
Posts
Picture 3. An example of three different brands’ post promotion strategies. With Socialbakers’ Promoted Post Detection tool,
you can see how your competitors are allocating their social content budgets - and how effective that strategy is for gaining
them total Interactions.
Response Time
Response time is also very important, and a great indication of quality customer care on social networks.
Some brands, such as KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, Walmart, and Best Buy, are truly Socially Devoted and have
fully integrated customer care into their social media channels – this allows them to deal with a huge amount
of questions in just a matter of minutes.

TOP 10 Socially Devoted Brands
Picture 3. Excerpt from our latest Socially Devoted infographic.

Examples of KPIs for other Platforms
Twitter YouTube Instagram LinkedIn
Total Followers Total Subscribers Total Followers Total Followers
Retweets, Replies,
Favorites Video Views
Interactions Status Engagement Rate
Daily Mentions Likes / Dislikes Number of Posts Number of Status Updates
If you know the metrics you want to measure, the next step is finding out how to measure them. There are some
built-in options available for some platforms, such as Facebook Insights, which allows you to track Facebook
audience size and Reach and other complementary metrics for pages you admin. However, using these options
only means you’ll never know how your business performs in your potential customers’ eyes - it’s the definition
of Flying Blind.
Independent analytics tools like Socialbakers Analytics give you a much wider view of your performance, as they
allow you to track both private and public metrics together, and public metrics (as well as post boosting strategy,
EdgeRank performance, and other insights) for your competition.
To truly understand the whole picture and make your social marketing efforts a valuable asset to your brand,
independent analytics tools are a must.
4. Native vs. Independent Analytics Tools

Metrics 50+ 4
Time Period Up To 3 Years 7 Days
Multi-Platform Support
Time Zone Support
Industry Regional Benchmarks
Labels
Mobile Access
One click reports
Social Customer Care Metrics
Content Newsfeed
Key Influencers
Admin User Post Sources
Post Details
User Activity Tracking
Capabilities
Overview
Socialbakers
Analytics
Facebook
Insights

Social media marketing is no longer just about growing your audience. Instead, it’s about creating shareable
content, using competitive benchmarking to understand that content’s performance with your audience, and then
amplifying it to the best audience possible. It’s also essential to provide top-flight, around-the-clock customer care
to incoming customer queries on both Facebook and Twitter. Socially Devoted brands see 3x more Interactions
than their unresponsive counterparts - and that translates to real business value.
Every social marketer knows how important it is to record KPIs - but that doesn’t just include your own.
It also means knowing how you compare to your competition.
Competitive analysis is the key to an objective evaluation of social media success. Socialbakers Analytics
is made for that, offering comparisons to dozens of preset industry and regional benchmarks.
It isn’t just your direct competitors you need to track. It’s also about the wider ecosystem – your retail and media
partners, other competitors’ content and paid strategies, and beyond that, other entities with whom you’re
competing for attention in the News Feed.
5. The Value of Comparative Analytics Benchmarking
Don’t measure in isolation
Direct
Competitors
Newsfeed
Competition
Ecosystem
Picture 5. The competition for Fans’ eyes in the News Feed includes more than just your business competitors.

Benchmarking and competitive analysis helps to
Quickly identify what KPIs need to be improved
Identify what content works and drives engagement
Picture 6. The Socialbakers Analytics dashboard with a list of all monitored pages and an overview of KPIs for all pages in one
place. It shows some interesting results, like that Air France is posting 10 times more per day than their competition. But while their
competition is posting less, they receive more interactions per 1000 fans, meaning that they are posting more effectively. In the same
view, you can see how well the brands are communicating with their audiences. We can clearly see that American and Southwest
Airlines are lagging behind the competition - they respond slowly, their response rate is low although they receive the fewest questions!
Picture 7. Sociabakers content newsfeed where all your and selected competitors’ posts are aggregated to see what content
works best.
Here, we’ve compared several top airlines by multiple KPIs. With this, Socialbakers Analytics users can use data
to take action and make immediate, informed decisions.
Socialbakers Analytics offers a powerful content News Feed where all of your and your competitors’ posts are
compiled to display the best performances for each KPI. You can order and filter out posts based on their number
of Interactions, Likes, Comments, and Shares, or by the post type (links, statuses, photos, or videos).

Measure and improve social customer care
Here’s an example of how competitive benchmarking with Socialbakers Analytics can help build brand affinity
through monitoring social customer care metrics. Even though Southwest Airlines’ competitors receive more
questions than they do, they manage to respond to a higher percentage faster than Southwest.
It looks like their whole social customer care operation could use some attention.
To identify what content works best and to drive engagement
To deliver better social customer care
Because it both leads to higher conversions and positive ROI from social
The bottom line is that Competitive Analysis is necessary

Socialbakers Clients consistently do better on metrics like these compared to the rest of the market. This table
shows how 3 major KPI’s progressed after brands began using Socialbakers Analytics. After 3 months,
Socialbakers clients exceeded industry standards in several areas, including Fan Growth (by 28%),
Organic Reach (by 20%), and Interactions (by 28%). Socialbakers Analytics lets social media marketers do
more in-depth competitive analysis, report more quickly, identify which content creates better relationships with
your audience, and monitor social customer care efforts.
Metric
1st month using
Socialbakers Analytics
2nd month using
3rd month using
Fan Growth +15 % +20 % +24 %
Organic Reach +6 % +20 % +20 %
Interactions +16 % +18 % +28 %
Every aspect of your business stands to benefit from using an independent analytics platform that includes both
public and private metrics.
In today’s social media landscape, every marketer needs to understand their competitive context. It is crucial
to optimize your performance and continually improve it over time. Remember, it is also essential to report to your
stakeholders to share the results of your social media success across your whole organization. With a tool like
Socialbakers Analytics, everything you need to succeed is in your hands.
Conclusion

If you have any questions about the Measure Social Media like a Pro
or want to suggest something for it - get in touch with us
at info@socialbakers.com.
Contact us

Measure what counts on social

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