Measuring What Matters in Your Social Media Strategy

Posted by nnlmneo on December 3rd, 2015 Posted in: Data Analysis

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We’re all trying to find ways to improve evaluation of our social media efforts. It’s fun to count the number of retweets, and the number of ‘likes’ warms our hearts.  But there’s a nagging concern to evaluators – are these numbers meaningful?

Your intrepid OERC Team, Cindy and Karen, attended a program at the American Evaluation Association conference in Chicago called “Do Likes Save Lives? Measuring What Really Matters in Social Media and Digital Advocacy Efforts,” presented by Lisa Hilt and Rebecca Perlmutter of Oxfam.  The purpose of their presentation was to build knowledge and skills in planning and measuring social media strategies, setting digital objectives, selecting meaningful indicators and choosing the right tools and approaches for analyzing social media data.

What was interesting about this presentation is that the presenters did not want to rely solely on what they called “vanity metrics,” for example the number of “impressions” or “likes.”  Alone these metrics show very little actual engagement with the information.  Instead they chose to focus on specific social media objectives based on their overall digital strategy.

Develop a digital strategy

• Connect the overall digital strategy to campaign objectives: (for example: To influence a concrete change in policy, or to change the debate on a particular issue.)

Develop social media objectives

• You want people to be exposed to your message
• Then you want people to engage with it somehow (for example, sharing your message) or make them work with it somehow (for example: sign an online petition after reading it).

Collect specific information based on objectives

• Collect data about social media engagement supporting your objectives that can be measured (for example “the Oxfam Twitter campaign drove 15% of the readers to signing its petition” vs. “we got 1500 likes”)

The presenters suggested some types of more meaningful metrics:

• On Twitter you can look at the number of profiles who take the action you want them to take, and then the number of tweets or retweets about your topic.
• For Facebook, the number of likes, shares and comments mean that your audience was definitely exposed to your message.
• Changes in the rate of likes or follows (for example if you normally get 5 new followers to your fan page a week, but due to a particular campaign strategy, you suddenly started getting 50 new followers a week)
• Number of “influential” supporters (for example, being retweeted by Karen Vargas is not the same as being retweeted by Wil Wheaton).
• Qualitative analysis: Consider analyzing comments on Facebook posts, or conversation around a hashtag in Twitter.

Overall, your goal is to have a plan for how you would like to see people interact with your messages in relation to your overall organizational and digital strategies, and find metrics to see if your plan worked.