Chapter 2
Assessing the Impact of Social Media Engagement
In This Chapter
Surviving information overload
Dealing with potential backlash
Measuring social media engagement
Assessing and improving engagement
We’re the first to admit that social media engagement can be challenging. As with any aspect of marketing, particularly newer ones that haven’t weathered the test of time, social media engagement has its pluses and its minuses. You have more opportunities than ever before to reach your customers in new ways and get closer to them, but you need to know about common pitfalls and how to avoid them.
In this chapter, we address the challenges and potential obstacles of social media engagement head on. We also provide an overview of how to measure your engagement activity with your audience, as well as how to assess how you’re doing. With careful examination of the results of your social media engagement tactics and campaigns, you will be better equipped to improve what you’re doing.
Considering the Downsides of Social Media Engagement
We don’t want to sound negative, but the truth is that social media engagement (SME) isn’t always easy. From experience, we know that the greatest barriers to engagement can be the concerns and doubts that crop up when you’re exploring options. You can easily become caught up in the hype and the naysaying of SME and begin questioning whether you even need to engage with followers.
People commonly question the worthiness of any new concept. Whether it’s a new technology or a new strategy that changes the norm, change can be difficult to accept. A common reaction to having to change is resistance or outright rejection.
To nip negativity in the bud, tackle it head-on. Information is the best weapon to counteract naysayers, whether it’s a boss, a manager, a client, a colleague, or yourself. Arm yourself with the information you need in order to make sound decisions about incorporating SME into the marketing mix.
Managing the “time suck”
Social media engagement takes time, there’s no doubt about it. We wouldn’t be honest with you if we didn’t admit that fact. There’s a difference between making time and wasting time. To prevent the latter, add these components to your SME strategy and process:
Goals: With SME, everything should start and end with your goals, and in your case, your business goals. SME can support many aspects of your business, but if you don’t keep your goals in mind, you risk wasting time.
A plan: Social media engagement requires strategic thinking, and it benefits from a written plan that outlines how to implement engagement strategies and tactics.
Guidelines: Follow best practices for SME, and craft guidelines tailored to your business. The guidelines should specify how frequently to publish content to your social networks, how much of it to automate, and how often to go online to check in directly with your community. See Chapter 4 for more details on developing SME guidelines.
Systems: Your plan should include the systems you’ll implement to streamline messaging and engagement across all your social networks. A system might include the way you link networks — for example, whether you post Facebook updates automatically to Twitter.
Tools: Implementing a system often requires the appropriate tools, such as a social media management (SMM) platform like HootSuite or Sprout Social to gather social networks under a single communications umbrella for efficiency and control.
Distraction is the enemy of social media engagement because it can lead you to wasting time and forgetting your business goals — the underlying reasons why you are engaging online in the first place. You can easily become distracted by all the messages, links, and information that appear in front of you. Stick to your plan, guidelines, and goals. Be disciplined about spending time in social networks.
Overcoming the barriers to entry
“It’s too hard.” We hear many people say that SME is just too difficult or too overwhelming to bother trying it out. We’re convinced that their hesitation stems from the common tendency to fear the unknown or to bite off more social networks than they can chew.
Consume SME in bite-size pieces, and take the time to “chew on” information thoughtfully. Then digest it before you take the next bite. Don’t rush into all aspects of SME all at one time.
You don’t have to be everywhere all the time. And don’t feel compelled to set up a presence on a new social network before you’ve truly mastered the one (or ones) that you’re already using.
In the following list, we highlight common barriers and then suggest sensible ways to overcome them:
“I don’t want to listen to people talk about their lunch.” The common misconception about social media engagement is that it consists of people posting online what they had for lunch (or something equally mundane). We’ll be honest with you — some people do post about what they’re eating. The majority of topics discussed in social networks, however, run the gamut from politics to products to personal moments in people’s lives. Publish useful content and connect with others online who do the same and your SME experience will be more valuable.
“I don’t have a social media presence.” Although we assume that you already have at least one social networking account, if you don’t have one yet, we recommend setting up a Facebook Page as the first platform for your SME because of the variety of ways you can post and the potential for exponential reach via friends and friends of friends. Don’t invite anyone to your page at first, to give yourself time to familiarize yourself with its features and to post some initial content. (See Chapter 9 for specific information on preparing for Facebook engagement.)
“I don’t have time.” Oh, that elusive 25th hour in the day we always think we need for SME. Social media engagement is about communications, a critical part of marketing and other aspects of doing business. Carve out time to engage in your social networks in the same way you carve out time for (or find help with) handling phone calls, responding to e-mail, or implementing other marketing tactics that require your attention and presence.
“I’m afraid of backlash.” Publishing online for the whole world to see inevitably invites occasional negative responses from individuals ranging from people who have simply “woken up on the wrong side of the bed” to folks with legitimate gripes. Look at these responses as opportunities to “right wrongs” and win people over. See the later section “Dealing with potential backlash” for more tips.
“I have no images.” Images aren’t mandatory components of SME, but they are attention-grabbing, shareable pieces of content. We’d be remiss to let you believe that images aren’t vital to engagement. If you sell products, chances are good that you have images, but you may offer services or produce written or audio content. Though a lack of images isn’t a deal-breaker for engagement, you should identify or create relevant images that visually illustrate who you are, what you do, and what you want to express. Use a smartphone to take photos that convey a sense of place “in the moment” and showcase your brand personality and company culture. Consumers want to see people behind the brands.
When your own supply of images begins to thin, use stock photography to share with your online community. Stock photos don't have to be stiff, fake, or cheesy. Check resources such as stock.xchng (www.sxc.hu), iStockphoto (www.istockphoto.com), and Flickr Creative Commons (flickr.com/creativecommons) to find appropriate images that you can adapt to your needs. Figure 2-1 shows examples of stock photos that work — you can modify these royalty-free images to use as visual elements in your social networks.
Figure 2-1: You can incorporate royalty-free images from SXC into your social networks.
Surviving information overload
Social media engagement requires a lot of reading, analyzing, and reporting. On its own, the act of engaging exposes you to a tremendous amount of information that can be overwhelming to digest. We have a few tricks up our sleeves to help you reduce the potential overload and to handle the fire hose of content and conversations coming your way.
Develop the habit of using a consistent process of engagement. These steps outline one process we’ve tested (with time estimates) that works well if you’re struggling to handle too much information:
1. Log in to your social network or social media management tool.
2. Peruse your news feeds and messaging streams to see what topics other people are discussing and to gauge the mood of your audience.
Average time: 5 minutes. Set a timer, if necessary.
3. Retweet, share, favorite, or otherwise engage with others as appropriate.
Average time: 5 minutes.
4. Look for public mentions of your brand or direct questions or requests. Respond or forward messages to the appropriate team members or to an assistant to help respond.
Average time: 5 to 10 minutes.
5. Look for direct or private messages that aren’t forwarded to your e-mail account, and respond or forward messages to the appropriate team members or to an assistant to help respond.
Average time: 5 to 10 minutes.
6. Log out, and get back to work.
That’s 20 to 30 minutes per session — tops. Repeat these steps two to three times a day. You can get a lot accomplished with SME in about an hour a day.
At times, you may have reasons to deviate from a process. The more active your social networks become and the more your community members interact with you, the more time and attention you should devote to build and maintain momentum.
After you’re spending more than an hour every time you monitor and manage your social networks and engage with your audience, look for additional ways to streamline, or turn to others for help. Follow these additional tips for managing information overload:
Filter the conversations. Look for features within the social networks or tools you use to filter conversations so that you see the information that's most important to your business. Use dashboard tools such as HootSuite (www.hootsuite.com), MarketMeSuite (www.marketmesuite.com), and SproutSocial (www.sproutsocial.com) to create columns or tabs of specific content streams, searches by hashtags, and other filtered criteria to home in on key conversations. Figure 2-2 shows an example of columns in HootSuite.
Stay on top of it. After you gain momentum from your engagement efforts, maintain consistency and stay on top of the messages and interactions. Develop a plan for covering your channels when you’re away so that you don’t return to the fallout from a failure to respond or to a glut of messages needing attention.
Hire help. The larger the online community, the less likely one person can spend an hour a day handling the interactions. Spending significantly more time than that can stand in the way of running your business. Consider hiring an intern or a virtual assistant to help you with SME, even if she covers only weekends and evenings or simply directs queries to the appropriate team member.
Figure 2-2: Manage multiple accounts and organize content feeds in HootSuite.
Replace genuine interactions with genuine replies, not timed or canned messaging. Though scheduling precrafted messages can be useful to lessen the burden of participating in your social media channels, you (or someone you’ve hired and trained) also need to pay attention and respond personally as frequently as possible.
In the end, spending all your time in social networks is unrealistic. When online community members point out your absence or delayed responses, simply admit that you’re human and that you’re doing the best you can. Thank people for their input and concerns. Then catch up as much as possible, continue to engage well, and identify areas where you can improve.
Dealing with potential backlash
Social media engagement involves humans. You’re human. Your team is human. All the people behind the avatars on all the social networks are human. Human beings are complex, emotional beings who can be sensitive and who may not excel at online communications. At some point, you and your company may experience negative, or even hostile, behavior from someone online.
Follow these steps to prepare for potential backlash and then handle it effectively:
1. Pay attention.
Hone your “digital listening” skills by carefully monitoring your social channels and the web at large to hear the positive comments about you and your company — and the negative ones.
2. Assess thoughtfully.
Avoid the urge to panic and respond in a knee-jerk fashion. Instead, evaluate a person’s true meaning or motivation versus a person’s words. Misinterpreting a snarky comment as criticism, for example, can turn a non-issue into a crisis.
3. Address negativity quickly.
Every minute counts when you’re faced with a negative comment in a social network. You may have many responsibilities to tend to, but someone who takes the time to complain about you or your company is often waiting for a response. Have a plan in place for crisis communications so that you know the options for responding. Use a rational, respectful tone in your response. Even an awkward response buys you time to further assess and address the situation.
4. Acknowledge the person’s feelings and perceptions.
After you review the situation and you’re ready to address the comment, understand that strong emotions may have prompted it. Use professional communications skills, and start your response with a statement to defuse those emotions, such as “I hear your frustration” or “We realize that the situation is challenging.” Don’t invalidate the person’s comments defensively — even someone who is incorrect deserves to be heard.
5. Don’t complicate.
Here’s the difference between a well-handled social media engagement situation and a full-blown crisis: The former involves preparedness and sensitivity; the latter, defensiveness and overthinking. Don’t run everything past hierarchies and committees in order to put a response on record.
6. Be human.
Don’t reply unemotionally. Be frank with the other person and all members of your online community who may be watching. People want to see a human response to a crisis, not an overproduced, formulaic, or canned reply. You may have to ask a lawyer or the legal department about admitting fault. But you can at least apologize that something has upset the other person.
7. Take it offline.
Don’t carry out any crisis control entirely in public. Ask to contact an unhappy individual privately and work to resolve the issue one-to-one.
8. Be transparent.
The flip side of going private is not to conduct communications so secretly that people perceive a cover-up. Strike a balance between public and private engagement when the discussion gets heated.
9. Fix the problem.
If someone attempts to bring a problem to your attention publicly, and it’s truly one that you can solve, admit it, address it, and fix it. If you can’t solve it, express empathy with the emotion being expressed. If nothing is truly wrong but someone perceives that it is, don’t dismiss those concerns. Take every exchange seriously, and do your best to resolve what you can or provide a resolution or consolation.
10. Tell your story.
Telling your own story throughout the “fixing” process can help defuse an issue. Providing updates such as “We’re looking into that issue” and “We’ve taken care of that situation” lets anyone paying attention see that you’re attentive and responsive and taking care of the matter even when you’re behind the scene.
Avoiding inconsistent messaging
Marketers know that it takes at least five impressions before a sale is closed. In cold calling, this rule translates to five calls or meetings. In online marketing, this doesn’t necessarily mean five views of a banner ad. Seeing a company’s logo on a banner ad could be one of five impressions that etches a company’s name into a consumer’s mind so they reach for that company’s product at the grocery store aisle. Another impression might be a reference from a friend in a social network while another might be a promoted post or tweet. Marketing messages need to be consistent from platform to platform.
Being consistent in your SME efforts is critical to building and maintaining your online reputation and the trust that develops from thoughtful interaction in your social media channels. When you aren’t solely responsible for monitoring or managing your channels, you should ensure that the tone and messaging always align with your brand image and personality.
The more people involved in monitoring, messaging, and posting, the more chance for missteps unless you can keep everyone on the same page. This list describes elements to compose or set up and share with your team:
Brand documents: Describe your brand personality, messaging tone, and other details that dictate how your brand is presented in social media channels.
Social media engagement guidelines and policies: Spell out the do’s and don’ts of posting and responding online for all members of your team.
A written Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) document: Strategically answer common questions and situations that are raised in your social media channels and compiled with the help of your team.
Terms of service or rules of behavior: Document these guidelines for your team, and post them publicly for your community members as well. Figure 2-3 shows community guidelines posted to a Facebook Page. You can post guidelines using a Facebook app maker, such as Woobox or Shortstack, or using Facebook Notes.
Community policies: Add a privacy policy and security policy, and post them publicly.
A team-oriented, social media management tool: Look for one that allows teams to work together to manage social channels, to assign tasks to team members, and to record outcomes, such as (on the high end) Radian6 (www.radian6.com) or (the more moderately priced) Sprout Social (www.sproutsocial.com), HootSuite, (www.hootsuite.com), or many others.
When you manage a community online in your social networks, clearly outline how you protect community members’ information that’s submitted via forms, surveys, registration, shopping cart checkouts, and other communications methods. Search for sample privacy and security policies at your favorite online search engine. Check with a lawyer or the legal department before posting on your website and social channels.
Figure 2-3: Community guidelines text posted to a Facebook Page.
Measuring the Value of Your Social Media Engagement
Consider what matters when measuring SME. We like to say, “It’s not quantity, but quality, that matters in social media engagement.” Aliza is also fond of saying, “I’d rather have 100 friends, fans, or followers who care than 1,000 who ignore me.” Look at everything you do online as a way to build bonds for the long term: Keep an eye on how the relationships start between you or your company and your customers and prospects as well as members of the public at large. When you share content, providing true value helps build a strong foundation for ongoing attention and interactions.
Determining what interactions are valuable
In advertising, costs and measurements are clear-cut, such as paying for an impression (Cost Per Thousand or CPM — the “M” actually stands for the French word for “thousand,” million) whenever an ad is viewed; paying for a click (Cost Per Click or CPC) whenever a viewer clicks on the ad; and paying for an action or a lead (Cost Per Action or CPA). Social media engagement requires metrics that are different from online advertising, because the mechanics of engagement involve a variety of activities and responses.
With more interactions happening as you engage via social media channels, you have many more numbers to track and even more ways to interpret them. How do you determine which numbers are the most important to you and your company? Go back to your business goals, what you’re trying to achieve, and what you hope the target audience does in response to your actions. Then match up the numbers that reflect how people are responding to you and the actions they are taking with your goals. If you’re seeing activity in your social networks that you can tie directly to supporting your business goals, you’re on the right track. If not, re-evaluate what you’re doing. Also consider whether the goals you’re focusing on are best supported through SME.
Though the ultimate goal of a business is usually to make a sale or a transaction, SME offers layers of value leading up to, and surrounding, an actual sale. All these seemingly ancillary aspects of engagement in your online channels help to build brand awareness, strengthen customer loyalty, and facilitate brand evangelism.
The benefits of SME may seem difficult to measure or even appear to be intangible, but they eventually lay the groundwork for selling in more personal and lasting ways than advertising ever will. To reach the mobile consumer who’s now connected and engaged in social networking, look at the whole picture of how they communicate and how you can reach, and engage with, them.
Social media engagement is not a silver bullet to achieve every marketing objective or solve every communications challenge. Just because you’re reaching out to an online audience doesn’t mean that they’ll respond consistently. Take the time to cultivate relationships and make genuine connections to see more tangible results.
Knowing which numbers to measure
The metrics you use to quantify your social media engagement vary from service to service. However, this list describes some similar types of activities that take place across all of them:
Attraction: Attracting a qualified, quality following is valuable. You can spend money to push messages to people via ads, but true engagement slowly and steadily builds the audience and connects with them over the long term. Measure the growth of your fan base by counting common metrics such as the number of friends, fans, and followers and by noting actual customers (or even likely prospects) if you can identify them.
Interactions: You must become part of the conversation online to convert participation by your friends, fans, and followers into interaction. Seek out opportunities to reciprocate participation by liking, commenting on, and sharing comments and by praising others. Pay attention to mentions, requests, and queries, and respond promptly. Keep track of these interactions, particularly the ones that move from social networks to other forms of communication such as e-mail — or even in-person encounters.
Actions: Actions are concrete and measurable when marketing online, even in SME, but they require consistent nurturing to take place more than once. Count and track comments and shares as well as likes, retweets, repins, and favorites, and note increases or declines in those activities. Look for potential reasons for the ebbs and flows of these actions, and modify your engagement tactics to account for variables such as time zone differences and changes to social network features.
Transformations: The magic of SME happens when your activities transform others, such as turning a dissatisfied customer into a happy one or turning a happy customer into an evangelist for your brand. When these positive transformations happen, the ripple effect of the good news reverberates through your own networks into your customers’ networks and beyond. Record the transformations you witness or cause — and archive everything for your records.
Transactions: As a marketer, your job is to help close the sale. Customers and prospects can carry out many types of transactions in addition to actual sales. Don’t discount activities such as taking polls, filling out surveys, listing contact information (and contact permission), and providing warm leads. Record all types of transactions that are closed throughout each week and month, and watch for trends. Look out for how different SME tactics translate into true transactions, including sales.
Use a tool such as Storify (www.storify.com) to track mentions of your brand in popular social networks, and arrange them chronologically or in an order that tells a story, as shown in Figure 2-4. The resulting visual compilation of tweets and posts is perfect to create reports and to help demonstrate the impact of your SME efforts. Storify lets you compile an organized archive of social media messages from other contributors that are tied together based on a keyword or hashtag.
Figure 2-4: A Storify story.
Setting benchmarks to evaluate progress
As with any measurement process, start with current numbers as benchmarks to establish a baseline or a starting point for analyzing growth in your SME activities. Record not only your numbers in any social networks and other social media tools you’re using but also more traditional measurements, including the tools described in this list:
Traffic to your website: When you use the proper messaging, SME can drive traffic to your site.
Benchmark: The number of visitors to your site
Referrers to your website: One common measurement in web traffic analysis is the number of referrers, or sites that refer traffic to your website. Note whether you see an increase in traffic from Facebook or Twitter or another social media tool you use.
Benchmark: The level of traffic that social networks drive to your site
Marketing e-mail subscribers: If you’re using e-mail marketing to reach customers or you’re sending a regular e-newsletter, note the current number of subscribers and then the changes based on integrating e-mail marketing into your social media messaging and networks.
Benchmark: The number of subscribers and even the number of times that your e-mail messages have been opened and shared
Customer service inquiries: Note how many calls or e-mails you’re receiving, and then begin tracking how they’re handled in social networks. You may even receive fewer calls and e-mails, so be prepared for the shift to the customer relations aspect of SME.
Benchmark: The number of customer service contacts and where they’re taking place
Transactions: Whether a transaction involves people signing up for demos or consultations or actually purchasing products, the numbers should change because of SME. If not, reexamine how you’re encouraging people to transact.
Benchmark: Current sales or other transactions
If you don’t set benchmarks that reflect how you’re meeting business goals, you cannot accurately measure the impact of your SME activities.
If you’re using a management-and-measurement tool, pay for a professional-level subscription that lets you run reports and save them. Run reports at least monthly to track your progress, and then archive them. Check the numbers weekly if your networks experience a lot of activity or you’re altering your engagement tactics. Record your numbers daily, such as an increasing number of fans and followers. Figure 2-5 shows a sample reporting feature in HootSuite that helps you visually quantify the effectiveness of your SME efforts.
Figure 2-5: A sample report from HootSuite.
Reassessing to improve engagement
Social media engagement isn’t an exact science. As you measure your engagement efforts, consider all the variables of being human and interacting with other humans. The core aspects of social media engagement involve human beings, and many variables can affect the interactions between people online, such as
The time of day: You’ll reach different people in different parts of the country or world depending on the time of day you post.
The time zone: If you are trying to reach your community “in the morning,” this could mean posting during your afternoon to reach someone in an earlier time zone.
The day of the week: Every social network reports that their members use their service more frequently on specific days and usage patterns vary from network to network.
A person’s mood: Not every message you post will be interesting to someone, and there are factors in an individual’s day that can make them more or less receptive to your message.
A person’s attention span: Any of your posts might be too long or too complicated for some people.
The level of information overload: If someone is overwhelmed by their social network news feeds, they may tune out your message.
You will eventually, and inevitably, see the ebb and flow of your engagement reflected in your SME statistics. Though you may be tempted to panic whenever you reach the end of a day with low engagement, be wise and look at data over the longer term, not simply during a single day or even a week.
Look for trends in the engagement numbers, and read online reports about engagement trends on each social network and platform you use to interact with the audience. Don’t hold too strictly to the trends you read about — not all trend reports provide consistent figures. Use trends as food for thought, and then test the ones that seem relevant to you and your audience.
An example of inconsistent trend reporting is demonstrated by the difference between URL shortener bit.ly (bitly.com) stating that you should post to Facebook between 1 and 4 p.m. eastern time and especially Wednesdays at 3 p.m. eastern time on Facebook but Buddy Media, on the other hand, stating that Wednesday is the worst day to post and that weekends are better. Who's right? You have to read the entire reports to understand their methodologies. The more important answer is that the ideal posting time depends on your company and your audience.
Pay attention to your own brand’s SME trends to see how your particular audience reacts to your posts in social media. Map out optimal posting times, but remain flexible and ready to shift based on the response of your audience over time. Danielle has found mornings between 8 and 11 eastern time to be the time when people are most responsive to her online, but it’s more than the time of day that matters — it’s also the day of the week. Mondays are more active for her than Saturdays. Aliza discovered inadvertently that her random tweets after work hours draw an attentive and responsive audience as do later-night tweets around 10 p.m. eastern time. Exploring this trend further, she found that many of her followers who respond at those times are from Australia and New Zealand.
What works this month may not work well next month, because of variables that may be beyond your control. Even a slight tweak by Facebook to the display of your Facebook Page updates in other people’s news feeds can throw off your previous communications rhythm.
Because of all the shifts and changes in the tools you use for SME, you must measure consistently and over long stretches to get the information you need to continually improve how you engage online. Above all, be consistent but flexible to adapt to the constantly changing online landscape.
Don’t stress over the numbers as you watch them increase and decrease. These changes are commonplace. Don’t let declines bring you down. As in the stock market, your SME numbers will continually increase as long as you use the tools properly and can account for both losses and gains.
Leveraging success
We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: Social media engagement starts with knowing your business goals, your audience, and the workings of the social networks you use. Knowing which SME strategies work for your company — and inspire the greatest number of reactions, interactions, and actions — helps you build on your successes.
Pay attention to the types of posts and messaging that work best for your audience. Then do more of what works and less of what doesn’t. It sounds simple, doesn’t it? It takes practice, but we know it’s possible. You can do it!
If you’re using several social networks for online marketing and engagement, you might be tempted to put all your eggs into the network basket that returns the best results. Though there’s wisdom in using the most powerful network most often, don’t ignore other networks outright. Look to leverage the best network by using these additional methods:
Integrating: Merge your other social networks to post into the most successful one.
Linking: Connect to your other social networks in posts on the most successful one.
Converting: Implement an advertising budget on your best network.
Promote all your social networks on the most successful one, and enhance the best one by using the others. For example, if Facebook is your main social network, you can still use Instagram and set it up to post photos to your Facebook Page to add visual interest. Connecting social networks so that they feed into one another in an orchestrated way can make them all more effective.
Success with SME relies on not only your own actions but also the actions of others. Pay attention to the participants in your online community because their activities fuel the conversations and the amplification of your messaging. Pay attention to what works well for them, and do more of it.
People like to be appreciated and recognized. Offer online community perks, discounts, or other benefits for engaging with you and to show appreciation of their attention and interactions. Don’t attempt to bribe your community — buying loyalty is a short-term fix to inattentiveness or apathy. Instead, express genuine concern about community members and recognize their contributions.