This post is by Chris Pinner, sponsorship analyst at Synergy Sponsorship.
Closing the Telegraph's Business of Sport article on 'The importance of social media in sport', Synergy CEO Tim Crow says rightsholders "need to focus less on selling price and impressions and much more on delivering engagement and value".
He's right – value metrics are the future. And with more words set to be published on Twitter in the next 2 years than in all books ever printed, the cost of getting social media measurement wrong – by using vanity metrics such as "likes" and "clicks" – is set to skyrocket. This blog aims to provide a quick guide to moving sponsorship towards better social media measurement.
The majority of data points available in off-the-shelf analytics packages are what author of The Lean Startup, Eric Reis, calls Vanity Metrics – they might make you feel good, but don't offer clear guidance on what actions to take. Put another way, they do not help make decisions on how to drive value. Since around 80% of companies use vanity metrics, it's clear that sponsorship must move from vanity to value in social media ASAP.
"But how?" I hear you ask.
Social media is very different to other channels in terms of data accuracy, frequency and availability. Platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter can offer a wealth of data on user actions to the very second at which they took place, and the rise of real-time is set to transform the way we estimate and track value beyond what I can imagine. That means a move to value metrics in social media will have to leverage some of the most advanced measurement tools and techniques out there today.
We can understand value creation through Social Media with a simple framework for understanding social media value:
Reach – the number of unique impressions (organic & paid) made on the audience. Put another way, it's the number of people who actually see an ad pop up in their newsfeed on Facebook or Twitter, or the pinboard of Pinterest users.
Engagement – directly purchasing a promoted product or interacting with and sharing brand content. Fundamentally, it's the people who "like", "share", or "comment" on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.
Advocacy – sentiment of the users who engage with the ad. In other words, the degree to which they are positive, neutral or negative towards the ad.
Purchase – the number of users who see the ad who, are converted to sale. In simple terms, it's the people who have, one way or another, seen the ad and parted with their cash because of it.
Sales – Cost = Return on Investment (ROI)
Job done!
Or not, as it turns out. Analytics experts reading the above (I'm sure there are many…) will have noted the "simple" approach above is perhaps a bit too simple. Reach and Engagement are indeed hard to measure. There is, in fact, a relationship between impressions and interactions: the greater the Engagement level, the more users interact, the larger the resulting Reach. Put another way, albeit making an inference about causality, more engagement can drive more impressions – social media users who engage with and share brand ads are growing the number of people 'impressed'.
(Click image to enlarge)
Analysis has shown the correlation coefficient between impressions and engaged users to be +0.83
Transitioning to an approach like the one outlined above, and addressing the interaction across stages, would be represent a significant step forward for the sponsorship industry.
Learning from social media
While data frequency in more traditional channels such as live-event, TV or Radio broadcast may never reach the levels seen in social media – it does not need to – brands should push for the same level of data accuracy and availability. The key is to transform their respective vanity metrics, like branded mentions and views, into value metrics.
Further lessons lie in the dashboards and user-interfaces used to visualize social media metrics today. In an age of big-data, it is easy to get lost in a sea of information without getting to insight. Social media platforms like Facebook – and behind-the-scenes Facebook Insights – are a step ahead of other sponsorship channels in tracking user data pre-, during- and post-campaign. We must learn from them.
So what next?
With only 1% of companies currently being "socially native" – meaning (among other things) they have measurement to match business objectives – the sponsorship industry has a long way to go. But a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. I hope this blog will help the industry take it.
