One of the biggest frustrations in social media is the inability to measure its value. There’s no standard metric which is consistently used, which makes it incredibly difficult to work out how well a campaign did. Do we measure based on impressions? Traffic driven to sites? Engagement? Advocacy? Net promoter score? Or simply the amount of fans/followers?

Without a consistent frame of reference, it makes measuring success incredibly difficult. At a recent WARC conference, Richard Pentin from TMW presented the audience with the picture you can see.

This serves as a great analogy to the current state of social media, as the picture is absolutely useless without a frame of reference. Is it the moon, or a molecule, or a ping pong ball? Without any consistent reference point it is impossible to measure something, and this has consistently been a problem with social media. It has become common place for campaigns to be measured by their ability to grow a Facebook Page’s “likes”, or a Twitter account’s followers. However, this represents a fundamental misunderstanding in the value of social media, and one that I’d like to correct as we move forward into 2012.

Take Facebook likes as an example. It is becoming increasingly popular for users to “hide all posts” from brands rather than unlike them, which means the brand has no way of knowing whether that user is ignoring all of their communications. In a similar example, a Twitter post is likely to reach an average of between 5-20% of your followers, depending on the time of day it’s posted. This means a large portion of the content doesn’t ever get seen, and we have no way of knowing or measuring it either way.

An increase in likes doesn’t neccesarily correlate with an increase in engagement, and that leap of logic represents one of the biggest failings in social media thus far. Moving forward, we need to take a new approach with social media, and embrace a more accountable measurement. There’s a lot of debate around the best metrics to use, and there are issues with a large portion of them.

The ideal solution would be to measure it by spend, but this can be incredibly difficult to do. Sure, if you’re a fashion brand with e-commerce solutions it can be possible, but for FMCGs or high investment B2B services, it can be nigh on impossible to track from first contact through to purchase.

Lots of people like to measure by NPS (net promoter score), which can work well long term, but still presents a problem for FMCGs and smaller social media campaigns. NPS measurement can be costly, time consuming, and is easily influenced by environmental factors.

One of the most undervalued metrics in social media is amplification. On both Twitter and Facebook you can measure how many times your message gets shared on by your fans, and this is a far better reflection on the success of your content than any of the other metrics. It gives a better reflection of true reach, highlights your brand advocates, and also serves a completely separate purpose – homophily.

Homophily is, according to Mat Morrison of Mediavest, one of the core benefits of social media above other forms of media. By definition it is “the love of the same”, and it is a long established psychological behaviour that has been used in marketing. In this context, it means that if a consumer receives a message from a friend they will be far more likely to act on it than if they heard the same message from an unknown entity.

By placing more value on organic amplification and less on the total available audience, social media will become a lot more accountable in the eyes of marketeers, and ultimately become a more effective marcoms media channel.

via !nvent blog

Felix Morgan | Creative Technologist
Billington Cartmell | @thinkingbrands

—