HOW TO MEASURESUCCESS IN SOCIALWHY ENGAGEMENT RATES ARE A RED HERRING AND HOW YOU SHOULD TRACK YOUR RESULTS

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HOW TO MEASURE SUCCESS IN SOCIAL

WHY ENGAGEMENT RATES ARE A RED HERRING AND HOW YOU SHOULD TRACK YOUR RESULTS

Let me start by saying sorry. From us agencies to you brand marketers, we’re sorry.

Social builds brands and creates sales. As a

marketer who believes in social, you can

o�en �nd yourself defending this fact. Or

maybe, just sometimes, when you’ve had a

bad day, maybe not quite believing it. We’re

sorry about that, it’s our fault.

When social was coming of age and into the

consciousness of people and brands (I’m

thinking, circa 2011) it was all very exciting.

As agencies and marketers we all inherently

knew (know!) that communicating and

building relationships with consumers

builds brands and ultimately leads to sales.

‘Social’ was where people communicated

with one another and built personal

relationships so it made pretty good sense.

Nowadays when you add the sheer scale of

social on top of this fact, it becomes a no

brainer.

But we made a mistake, and this is why I

want to apologise.

Hi, We are Impero, we bring brands fame

and glory. Here's why.

At their essence, brands are tools to help

people make decisions on what to buy.

Fame and glory makes those decisions

easier.

Famous brands sell more stu� because

famous brands are always top of mind.

Glorious brand experiences help sell

more stu� because rich and engaging

executions linger longer in consumers'

minds and create deep relationships and

brand passion.

If you want to bring your brand Fame

and Glory – hire us. We’re awesome.

www.weareimpero.com

IMPERO

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OUR MISTAKE – WE INVENTED THE ‘ENGAGEMENT RATE’

We didn’t work hard enough to create meas-

ures that told us anything interesting or

insightful about our successes or failures in

this space. Instead we rounded up any data

we could get (which was severely limited at

the time) and invented a measure. We took

all types of engagements and divided them

by reach (or worse, fan numbers). Yep, we

invented the ‘engagement rate’ and it was a

mistake. Here’s why.

And that was about it. We knew every other

brand was is in social and they must be onto

something. If we knew we were doing well

against our competitors, that was good news!

And we kept going - making more creative

that resulted in a better engagement rate, so

we kept winning.

But benchmarking yourself against your

competitors only tells you so much. In fact, it

doesn’t usually tell you anything of real

value when it comes to social. It doesn’t take

into account your goals, and the fact that

they are probably di�erent from your

competitors. So why is it something that we

obsess over?

We invented a measure and made creative

to achieve success by this measure without

ever questioning what we should be meas-

uring in the �rst place. I refer to it as the

“social red herring”. It distracts us from using

relevant and important social measures.

Well, it’s time to grow up. It’s time to link

social back to business and brand goals.

Engagements

Reach

A good agency sales pitch

=

We (agencies and brands – no, I don’t think

we should take all the blame for this) desper-

ately needed to prove that social made a

di�erence, but we weren’t sophisticated

enough to prove it outright. So we invented

the engagement rate’ because it told us how

well we were performing in social compared

to our competitors. The discussion went

something like this:

Benchmarking doesn’t usually tell you anything of real value when it comes to social.

“How are we doing in social?”

“Well, we have the highest engagement rate in our category”

“Great, keep going”

DEFINE WHAT TYPE OF CAMPAIGN WE SHOULD BE RUNNING

Nope, you won't hear many digital and social

agencies say this, but not all problems are

best solved online. So before we start, should

we even be in social?

Let’s assume the answer is yes, otherwise

this article won't reach it’s word count.

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DEFINE THE MEASURES THAT WILL PROVE ITS SUCCESS OR FAILURE. AND CREATE YOUR OWN SCORE CARD

This is the tricky part, but the most valuable

step in this process. It’s why I wrote this

article. It’s where social gets personal,

because your score card is all about you.

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DEFINE THE STRATEGY TO ACHIEVE THOSE GOALS

Every good communications campaign starts

with a good strategy.

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MAKE CREATIVE AND RUN CAMPAIGN

A step not to be taken lightly of

course, but for the purposes of this article

let’s bundle this whole process into a single

step.

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TRACK AGAINST WHAT IS SET OUT IN STEP 3

To gauge the success, start tracking results

against your score card immediately.

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6 STEPS TO MEASURING SUCCESS AND FAILURE IN SOCIAL

DEFINE THE PROBLEM

What problem are we trying to �x?

Or, what goal are we trying to

achieve? Do we have low awareness or

frequency? Do we have an image problem?

Do we need to increase likability (like with a

lowercase ‘l’ you’ll note). Do we have a new

product that we think our audience will

love? Or is it something else?

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So let’s look at step 3 – and how it can be applied to you and your brands...

4BRANDSCORECARD

FOR EACH LIKEWe really want people to read our message, and agree with it, we want people to be positive about what we’ve had to say. The human reaction to this on Facebook is to click the little ‘Like’ button.

HOW TO DEVELOP A SCORECARD

Scorecards enable you to weigh the quantity

and quality of speci�c social actions to then

determine how successful a social

campaign is. It allows us to move away from

the ‘one size �ts all’ measurement.

Right now, we need to talk in concrete terms

so let’s say your brand’s problem is relevance

within your target demographic.

We all know your brand, but it doesn’t get us

going, it doesn’t resonates with us.

We have nothing in common with it. It’s nice,

but dim.

In the days of old, we would have said “let’s

make some content and track our beloved

engagement rate”. We would have measured

all likes, comments, shares, re-blogs,

favorites, whatever, who cares, just track it.

All engagements were equal. We just want to

be better than the guy down the road (our

competitor).

Nowadays, we need to think hard about

what type of measure will track our success

or failure.

To keep this simple example,even more simple, let’s keep this to Facebook exclusively. Let’s say...

FOR EACH SHAREShare’s are good – we want people to agree and share our message for word of mouth reasons, but they’re not our primary concern, because we don’t want to skew our creative into cheap tricks to get shares.

REACH, 10K PEOPLEWe need to reach people, who doesn’t, but it’s less about share numbers of reach here, it’s more about them Likes – so let’s attribute 10 points for every 10K people reached.

VIEW RATE DROP OFFIf someone watches our �lm (if we create them, and maybe we won't because they score so low on our scorecard) longer than 75% - we get another 10 points.

Films are great for landing messages, but again, we’re less concerned with people hearing our message, more concerned with them agreeing with it.

COMMENTS (NON-NEGATIVE)Comments are great, we love comments, but stoking up lots of debate or feedback won’t help us solve our current brand issue. So we don’t want to skew our creative towards comments (e.g. ‘tell us what you think below’ or ‘choose A or B’ type creative).

50PTS

25PTS

10PTS

10PTS

5PTS

Your scorecard should be developed with

your agency.

You should probably work with a planner,

strategist or an analyst to do this. BUT NOT

THE CREATIVES. We �nd, for best results,

brief the creative team once they know what

they are trying to achieve.

WHAT’S A GOOD SCORE?

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NOW BRIEF IT IN

Good question. But, sorry, we can’t answer

that for you. We don’t know your investment,

your market, or your consumer. But what we

can tell you is; if you follow the scorecard

method and you get the weighting right you

can compare return on social investment

between your brands and campaigns and

start to really understand which campaigns

are performing and which aren’t. And impor-

tantly, how those campaigns are solving

your brand goals.

If you stick with engagement rates, you run

the risk that your agency will chase a high

rate before chasing a solution to your brand

problems. And as a brand you’ll never be

able to tell if you’re winning or not.

In the simple example I have outlined above,

we want to show people our brand has more

in common with them than they think. We

want to show our target market we’re not

that di�erent - in fact, we share the lot of the

same ideas. In our language, ‘we’re relevant’.

First and foremost, I hypothesize that we

need to make a lot of content that people can

align with, agree with and think positively

about. Content that people like (lower case l).

In this case, a good idea to track Likes (with

an uppercase L). If we can put content out

there that encourages a million unique Likes

for the campaign, it means we have a million

consumers who have seen our messaging

and outwardly told us they agree with it.

But the other measures still matter, we work

to a total scorecard sum of 100. By allocating

points for each measure out of 100, we can

accurately compare campaigns – even when

the objective or brand goal is di�erent.

+44 207 998 7571MICHAEL@WEAREIMPERO.COM

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