Social Business Metrics: Measuring Engagement Not Mentions

Transforming your business into a social business means more than simply monitoring mentions and buzz. It means being able to further categorize the large volumes of conversation for consumer expressions around intentions and preferences. It means better audience segmentation and surfacing demographic details.

Transforming your business into a social business means more than simply monitoring mentions and buzz. It means being able to further categorize the large volumes of conversation for consumer expressions around intentions and preferences. It means better audience segmentation and surfacing demographic details.

Here at CI, we are actively working with clients to not only analyze social media conversation but to make it relevant to their business. To that end, we are creating indexes that focus more on how engaged a customer is rather than simply volume of activity.

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For example, our Retail Conversation Index is a weighted, indexed sum of three metrics:

• Overall Volume – amount of activity over a select period of time
• Engaged Shoppers- measures the number of mentions from shoppers, who are currently at, recently or going to each retailer.
• Active Shoppers – represent the # of people who expressed active engagement, identified by shoppers, who expressed purchase intent, affinity or favorite.

Not only are retailers ranked by which have the most engaged, active and numerous shoppers,  but a retailer can quickly get a high level competitive overview of where their particular organization ranks relative to their competitors. You can toggle between different brands and dates enabling an organization to track releases, campaigns or any other outreach effort.

Customers Who Engage vs. Customers Who Mention

Consumers who express an intention to purchase, to view or who may be having a problem provide much more valuable detail than one who simply clicks like. Think about what is important to your business, what metrics provide insights into the successes of your business. The metrics you identify are the ones where social media analytics should be used to better understand how the context of consumer engagement may influence its outcome.  If it’s sales data, then analysis of expressions of intention to buy, or buying, including the time range when this behavior is described can provide your organization with early alerts to changes in buying habits, impacts of discounts or campaigns or emerging issues with a product. The point is to start with the key business metrics, then integrate or correlate social media insights  for a more complete and real-time view of your social business

Check our our new view of the engaged customer