Marketers commonly focus their Twitter metrics around softer numbers like number of followers, number of retweets and @ messages. While these soft metrics are important and should definitely be part of any Social Media monitoring and engagement program, it’s important to have a metric that has some teeth — dollars.

Quantifying the Value of Positive Twitter Mentions

Positive Twitter mentions can be quantified in dollars if you think of them in terms of display ads and apply a CPM to each mention. As an example, imagine a brand that had 1,000 Twitter mentions in a month and 99 of those were positive. Using a tool like Radian6, you can calculate the total number of followers of those accounts which posted the positive mentions — in this case let’s suppose the total reach of those tweets was to 200,000 people. Using a very conservative CPM of $5, those mentions were worth $1,000 to that organization. The CPM can be adjusted to fit your industry.

What do you think of this method?

Check out this video blog post from Jeremy Hilton as he talks about his wishlist feature for Facebook that could enhance the Newsfeed experience. If you’re interested in learning more about EdgeRank, check out Jeremy Hilton’s post on SocialFresh.com or visit the EdgeRank Checker blog — these guys really know their stuff. Lastly, your comments and feedback on the video are welcome!

It’s the end of the year and everyone is coming out with predictions for big trends in 2012. Here’s three of the dark horse trends that may be unheard of right now, but have the potential to make the largest waves in social media.

Customer Connections

So far a lot of social media marketing for brands has been establishing social proof by letting a customer know that their friend likes or uses their products. The next step in this direction is to put customer in contact with customer and unite them around their support of the brand. This works on the consumer level (“Your friend bought this product and you can save 5% now if you share your purchase with them”) and the B2B side (“We’re working with a medical office and want to put your dental practice in touch with them as you already share some of the same followers in your network.”)

Social Teams

While successful enterprise wide social media adoption of connecting tools like Salesforce Chatter or Yammer continue to challenge most organizations, more and more smaller units will adopt those tools and leverage them for institutional awareness, clear communication and finding synergy between different projects within the company. Social media strategists will need to focus more time internally to make sure all these opportunities are being met, but the result will often be great improvements that couldn’t have been achieved without the connecting tools.

Big Data & the Social Media Analyst

Now that the role of the Social Media Manager has been clearly established, the next major hiring trend will be for a Social Media Analyst. Over the last few years the major social networks have made a lot more data available for analysis. At the same time Social Listening tools have continued to improve. Organizing that data, extruding significant statistics, and highlighting trends is becoming the domain of a relatively new position – the Social Media Analyst. The analyst works with the manager to sort and sift all the data coming in, find new sources of data, and new ways of presenting it and then provides that information to the team or client in a clear and easy to understand manner.

Are you planning on introducing any of these trends to your business?

Cyber Monday 2011 exceeded all expectations with a estimated $1.2 billion in sales according to the New York Times. Additionally, a recent study found 50% of e-commerce visitors are logged into Facebook at the same time whether they are aware of it or not. Taken together, these two statistics beckon the question “how much influence does social media (and specifically Facebook) have on Cyber Monday or e-commerce in general?” The answer to this question is that there is evidence to suggest a relationship does exist.

The Saturday before Cyber Monday, TechCrunch identified a strong correlation between Facebook activity and Cyber Monday performance in addition to citing peer-to-peer sharing as the driving force of this relationship. Again, given how integrated Facebook has become in the average user’s online world, it is easy to make this correlation.

Next, if there is a correlation, then how much did community management of individual Facebook fan pages play a role in Cyber Monday sales? For example, if a retail branded Facebook page has inconsistent community management and lacks an engaging strategy, then the odds are minimal that they are able to reach both the news feeds of individual fans and friends of fans which leads to peer-to-peer sharing. However if a page is properly managed by a community management strategy based on industry best practices, then the effective reach of any messaging is maximized to fans and friends of fans thereby increasing the odds of peer-to-peer sharing.

Based upon experience, MindComet would argue that properly managed retail branded Facebook Pages performed better on Cyber Monday than fan pages that lack a proven strategy and consistent management.

What do you think?

Social Media is a competition where you’re up against your rivals vying for market share and more importantly, for your customers time and loyalty. Keeping score is an important part of competing and MindComet recommends that every community owner keep score on both their community and their competitors communities. Doing this will ensure that you always know exactly how your community stacks up against the competition.

What’s the Score?

While the score isn’t everything when it comes to Social Media, it’s an easy way to understand, at a glance, the health of your community versus the health of competing communities. MindComet scores communities on some basic, yet very important measurements — Direct Reach and Potential Reach, Rate of Engagement and Monthly Channel Growth

Reach

Extending reach is an important and obvious goal when competing for market share. The higher your reach, the more likely you are to acquire new community members. Your Direct Reach is the number of people who are directly connected to your messaging, typically through an explicit opt-in — it’s the size of your community. On Twitter for example, your Direct Reach would be equal to the number followers you have. Potential Reach is the size of your extended community — the number of people you can reach directly plus the number of people they can reach directly. Using Twitter as an example again, it’s your followers plus the total number of people following your followers.

Engagement

Engagement is perhaps the most important score when evaluating the health of your community as it speaks to the value and quality of your community members. Active and engaged community members will help to bring in new members, make the community more enjoyable and are more likely to convert on marketing messages that you publish. Engagement levels are reflected in the Rate of Engagement score — a measurement of community interaction with you and your content. On Twitter, this is represented by retweets, @ replies and click-throughs on links. On Facebook, engagement is represented by fan wall posts and likes, comments and shares of content.

Growth

Growth is important as it measures the quality of your community management efforts. A community manager who understands their audience and consistently publishes valuable content will see organic growth of a community. Monthly Channel Growth is the number of news fans/followers/etc that your adding per month. It’s a measure of the growth of your Direct and Potential Reach.

How Healthy is Your Channel?

These three scores are factored together to create what MindComet calls the Channel Health Score. The goal is to maintain a healthy community — one that has large Direct and Potential Reach, a high Rate of Engagement from community members and shows consistent Monthly Channel Growth.

How healthy is your community? How does your community stack up against your competitors communities? Who is winning the race?

Photo Credit: Steve Snodgrass

You can create your own stylized word cloud at wordle.net. There’s a range of layouts and font styles available as well as a variety of color palettes to choose from. Better yet, you can also create a custom one! The only downside is that it requires a Java plugin to run and doesn’t run as smooth as one would hope. Have fun!

A small change in Facebook’s news feed algorithm was made this week. It may have slipped under your radar, but it has potentially huge implications for your social media workflow and corrects a wrong that many had accused Facebook of ignoring.

The crux of the matter is that Facebook was aggregating posts made through third party publishing tools. This meant your story would sometimes be aggregated with other posts from that tool and hidden from the main wall view. The only thing you could do to avoid this was to publish the story manually on your wall or page. This created a weak link in any work flow where multiple people had to view or approve a post before it is made.

In a post made earlier this week on the developer forum the Manager of Facebook’s Preferred Developer Consultant Program, Matt Trainer, said:

“We’re always making changes to our News Feed algorithm. Most recently, we made some changes to our Page posts ranking system, which added more signals to determine Page post quality. However, we realized that some of the new signals were using aggregate data across many Pages rather than individual Pages. In looking at aggregate data, the distribution of high quality Page posts was at times, negatively impacted. We are addressing this issue and have implemented a resolution.”

Turns out not all third party applications were stuck on the wrong side of the aggregation event horizon. Tools like Buddy Media, Vitrue, Involver, Syncapse, and Context Optional, had been whitelisted by Facebook. When this was revealed in September, the drumbeat grew louder for a fix that would be fair to all third party publishing tools.

With the change finally made, all third party publisher tools will be treated equally. What remains to be seen is how that effects aggregation and news feed content over all. It’s something we’ll be keeping an eye on.

UPDATE: According to a post at SocialMouths.com, the 3rd party aggregation issue is being actively addressed by Facebook.

Photo Credit: GOIABA — CC by 2.0

You see statistics focused on the explosive growth of social media every day in news articles, blog posts and in presentations, yet do you think about them in the context of business?

Do you have a social media strategy that addresses these statistics and sets you up for future success?

We’re constantly pouring over research at MindComet and here’s some trends that really stuck out.

The Basics

• 72% of adult internet users are on a social network ¹
• 200 is the average number of friends a User has on their favorite social network ¹
• 636 is the average number of social connections for the social networking user ²

Channel Specific

• 800 Million people have a Facebook Profile or 1 out of 8.75 people on Earth are on Facebook ³
• 200 Million people have a Twitter Account ⁴
• Over 20 Million people use online or crowd sourced deals (e.g. Groupon, LivingSocial, WeReward, etc.) ⁵
• Over 40 million people participate or access review sites (e.g. Yelp, UrbanSpoon, Zagat, etc.) ⁵

Mobile

• 53% of Americans aged 18 to 44 own a smartphone ⁶
• 25% of mobile social networkers use their phone in the same way that they would network on a PC ¹
• Over 15 million people participate or access location based services (e.g. foursquare, SCVNGR, Gowalla, etc.) ⁵

When you see these numbers, which one(s) are the most impressive? Which ones do you think will have the biggest impact on your business?

Sources:

1. Mintel Report: Social Networking – US – August 2011
2. http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2011/Technology-and-social-networks/Part-3/SNS-users.aspx
3. http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics
4. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12889048
5. http://www.slideshare.net/midaslp/mary-meekers-web-20-presentation-october-18-2011
6. http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/?p=29786

Recently, I came across an interesting post from Ben Parr titled Tweets Last Up to 67 Times Longer for Users With Higher Klout Scores [INFOGRAPHIC]. Like everyone, I enjoy a good infographic and have always paid attention to the Klout score as a measurement of influence even though I don’t endorse it as a measurement for ROI.

Like the title suggests, Parr’s article presents data to show how individuals who have high Klout scores enjoy better stamina in their tweets. This is important since time decay is vital to any social media initiative; the longer the shelf life, the move individuals are exposed to it. However, I find the post problematic.

First, the data and infographic are from Klout. Given that their formula is unavailable for review, I’d argue that it shows a weak correlation between an individual’s score and time decay. Also, what came first? – a high Klout Score caused more people who follow to pay attention and engage OR do engaging people whose tweets have long shelf lives result in a higher Klout Score?

I’m sure that this might be seen as overly critical, but I know a lot of my industry peers who take this measurement seriously. Personally, I’ve aways had a problem with Klout that goes beyond the fact that we simply don’t know how the score is determined.

For example, if you accept the concept of Social Technographics, then you have to ask yourself – who is more important to my business?

Is it the Creators? The Collectors? The Spectators?

I’d argue that each role plays a vital role on the social web and influence exists as an individual variable based upon relationships on and offline.

Given this, does reach and network truly matter? For example, what if your Spectators are incredibly influential (e.g. sharing, offline word of mouth, etc.) as opposed to the Creators of your audience?

Until we understand what exactly Klout measures, I believe it to be soft measurement at best.

What do you think?

Is an individual’s Klout score important to you and your business?

Can you think of an example where a high Klout score proves hard ROi?