SEO company BrightEdge produce a monthly report into social media related things. One notable feature of the report is how many top brands have a presence on the various social media platforms. Their December report revealed that 77% of the top 100 brands now have a Google+ page. This compares to 93% for Facebook.
So comparable numbers, but I wonder if they have comparable purposes? Do brands offer different things on each of the platforms? Does their Facebook page do different things to their Twitter account?
Obviously there are technical differences between each platform that will go some way to determining the kind of content you can share and the kind of interactions you can have, but I wonder how many brand marketers look for a purpose first of all and then look at what platform to use, or whether they approach things from the other way and simply treat each new platform as another way to broadcast the same messages?
To help you decide it might be worth having a portfolio document for your communities. It could look something like this
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Community 1 |
Community 2 |
Community 3 |
Community 4 |
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Description |
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Purpose |
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Target audience |
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Who created it? |
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Age of community |
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Which organisational goal does it support? |
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Who are the key dependencies? |
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How much has been invested in it? |
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What success have you had? |
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What extra investment is required? |
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How are you justifying this? |
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This will allow you to easily and simply see how your communities are doing, not by some arbitary figure like the number of followers, but against the real business purpose for the community having been created.
If you don't yet know what your social ROI is, this blog might help.
If you have a presence on multiple platforms, how do you differentiate between them?
Seems for many consumers they regard social media channels as customer service facilities.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/…
I think it would be valuable to get feedback on the various purposes that people perceive for their SM sites. At the company I work for our goals for SM are: keeping up to date on changes in the industry, publicity for the content we publish, establishing a brand for the company, understanding customer needs, customer support, and providing help/advice based on our experiences.
How do you measure the ROI on your communities Terry?
For our company related communities, we take into account all of the factors I mentioned above. Some of those are difficult (at least for small companies) to measure directly — e.g. brand establishment, and so we take a fairly qualitative approach. Some are more amenable to measurement — e.g. # of customer support incidents, avg. time to resolve, etc. So we track that data and look for trends.
The software that we produce is used to support private online communities for associations, and they typically are primarily interested in member engagement since that has a fairly direct link to renewal rates. So, within our software we track things like the fraction of the total membership that visits the site per week, the fraction of members actively contributing content, etc.
Sounds like you've got some good metrics there. Have you found them useful getting wider buy-in for the work you do, in particular from senior management?
Since I qualify as senior management at my current company, the answer is "yes", but obviously that does not add much value 🙂
Our customers tend to use a more intuitive approach to assessment (e.g. log onto the community and look at the level of activity), but we do find statistics on non-active participation (e.g. reading postings) is useful because they don't necessarily see that simply by looking at the system.
Presumably you need to showcase the value of the community to other senior managers though? For instance I think most organisations go through various phases depending on how they view social media.
Folly – when people think social media is a waste of time
Fearful – when people are scared of giving people a voice
Flippant – neither fear nor fervour. Build and pray approach.
Formulating – when value is seen and strategies attempted
Forging – where people integrate social media into their daily lives and it breaks out of a community manager/marketing dept responsibility
Fusing – the most advanced attitude, when social media philosophies are at the heart of everything we do.
Having some good, clear metrics that align what we do with some business benefit is a really nice way of moving through those phases.
I completely agree. We're small enough that we tend to operate rather informally and the entire senior management group has always been relatively keen on social media — mostly because our backgrounds have a lot of involvement in social and collaborative computing going back 25 years.
For our customers, our focus is on online communities for members, so we don't generally deal with the full scope of social media across the entire organization — although we definitely help out on that front when asked. With respect to online communities, the focus is invariably on engagement and so we are focused on metrics that relate to that.