Chris Mercer, aka Mercer, co-founder of marketing company Measurement Marketing dot io, shares his expertise on how to use social media analytics to measure our impact.
Now that we’ve taken a deep dive into the social media universe – from figuring out the type of content we want to produce to the best ways to distribute it – we are wrapping up our Digital Now series with Mercer. From here, we can use the data available to measure the impact of all our hard work developing our social media presence. Although having the ability to understand what’s happening in this universe can seem daunting given the hundreds of metrics available for each social platform, Mercer shows us why it’s not as tricky as it seems.
Elyse:
Welcome to Digital What?, a podcast series where we join UNDP personnel and experts in conversation about the digital communications questions you’ve always wanted to know, but were afraid to ask. Today we speak with Chris Mercer, aka Mercer, about social media analytics. He’s the co-founder of a company called Measurement Marketing Dot IO.
Mercer:
Measurement marketing, as is really the process of listening to what your users are doing on the site and responding back to them.
Eyse:
Mercer helps marketers, marketing teams and agencies figure out what their numbers are and ultimately how to measure things so that they understand the conversation that's happening between the users and their websites.
So, now that we’ve took a deep dive into the social media universe, from figuring out the type of content we want to produce to the best ways to distribute it, we are wrapping up our Digital Now series with Mercer so that we can use the data available to measure the impact of all our hard work developing our social media presence. Having the wherewithal to understand what’s happening in this universe – from what our audience actually likes to hear from us to who is most engaged with us – can seem daunting. There are hundreds of metrics available on each social platform, but Mercer says, it’s not as tricky as it seems.
Mercer:
I'd say anybody that's looking for social media analytics is really just trying to figure out what's working and what's not. I think a lot of people overcomplicate these things called metrics and numbers. And you don't need to do that. All we're trying to figure out is what's working and what's not. In order to do that, we have to figure out what we are actually trying to achieve and then we just figure out how to measure it from there.
Elyse:
Luckily, social media analytics is easier today than ever. There’s a lot more visibility into not only results but also how we’re actually achieving those results across different platforms.
Mercer:
In particular, with Facebook, with Facebook Analytics, you can see a lot more of what's happening on the Facebook pages. What's happening on your Instagram posts, and ultimately how those connect to a website. If you're sending traffic from social media to a website, for example, you can actually tie what's happening on the social media end into the website. And of course, you can always do that with platforms like YouTube, if that's your social media of choice or even technically email, which was the original social media when it was just kind of one to one. But you can start to really tie in again, what with the traffic source is to the result that you're measuring. I think another important thing is to speak in terms of results, because that's where the challenge is I think with most people, is they're measuring for when they create a lead or when they make a certain sale, collect money, get a donation...right? Whatever that main action is. And they forget about all those “how” steps.
Elyse:
And to get a better idea of how to measure these “how steps”, Mercer teaches what he calls the ACE model.
Mercer:
Which stands for awareness, completion and engagement. And that's where I would say when you're first starting out to set up goals and think about "OK, what is the things that actually want to measure?" Start with awareness. So, when is the user on the site actually aware of the thing that I want them to be aware of? So if this was something where you were selling something online or some sort of e-commerce or trying to make a donation or something, it's it's that initial page that asks them to do that when they first could potentially do it, when they were aware of that process, then the completion is the actual doing of the thing. And that's what most people think about when they think about results. But we measure for that completion. So when did they make that donation? When did they purchase that product? And then there's engagement, which is what happens between some sort of awareness and completion...meaning in the example of a donation, it might be a page, “hey, donate to our organization”. Then they click on a link. They go to a cart system which actually collects the donation, and then they end up on a thank you page. So the awareness would be the initial page. That completion would, of course, be that thank you page that says, “thank you for the donation”. And that cart page would be that middle step would be the engagement step. And it's important to measure all of those, because with social media it's very difficult to go out there and say, “here's my thing, go buy it,” to a cold audience, to an audience that you don't know. Social media is about relationships. But it is easy to say,” hey, here's about my organization. Here's about the thing that I'm doing”. It's easier to create awareness from that. And so with social media, you measure more awareness-style goals. You can build an email list then maybe email them back to actually nurture them into creating the actions you want to take, which might be, again, donations or sales or something along those lines. And you can measure both sides of that to see how those two traffic sources are working together.
Elyse:
So in sum, if we are following the ACE model, once people see our posts, there are a series of questions we need to ask ourselves, like how many people saw it? How the people who saw it engaged with our post? And depending on our desired result, how far they went down the path that we want them to follow. And to measure awareness and engagement, Mercer has some tips for us if you use a platform like Facebook.
Mercer:
Now, awareness is a super tricky thing because remember, you're thinking in your head, “oh, they're actually aware of the thing”. And I would say that's not really what an impression is in media. Impression is just they were exposed to it. They probably won't even remember it. Most people won't. But the platform in this case, Facebook, will say, oh, you have 100,000 impressions. Most people have no idea that they're one of those impressions. Right. But that's the best thing that you would have to say at least, OK, here's about as many people as we had that could be aware of the thing. Now your engagement –that's what I would say, if you're measuring on Facebook, specifically the Facebook platform– that's where you do likes and the reactions, right? So it's like the shares, the comments, all that sort of stuff, because that's engaging with Facebook on Facebook. They're engaging with your post for sure those people are aware. Right. Because they took the time to engage. So you have a much higher quality relationship with that user because they're taking the time to actually participate with you, with that message that you put out there. And that's how I would manage the engagement and measure it in that way. In terms of the audience and who's doing that, I think to keep it as simple as possible, use the Page Insights that are available in Facebook. So there's Facebook Analytics, which is a whole other platform that Facebook has and there's Page Insights that kind of give you some background into the rough demographics of the users that are coming to your site and the actions that they're taking. I would just stick with Page Insights because I think that's going to give you the "enough to be good enough to get going." And I think that's really important in this world, is especially in the world of measurement. You can always do it a different way and a better way. So all you worry about is, what's “the good enough to get going way”? So I can see just basically what's going on. I'll come back and measure it better later. But I want to have at least some idea.
Elyse:
So, if we break down each step, it’s much easier to see what’s going on. And, today’s social media analytics tools have come a long way. Data used to be much harder to access and to measure.
Mercer:
Back in the day there was no Facebook Analytics.Now there's an entire platform inside Facebook that exists just to tell you how Facebook is working for you. So you could do ads. And you could create posts on pages and all that stuff. But you really couldn't see how many people were reacting or liking those that were happening on Facebook. So people staying on Facebook, leaving comments or liking or reacting to your post, sharing your post, you really couldn't measure that very easily. They had Page Insights and you sort of had some idea of how your pages was going, but that was about it. But now with tools like Facebook Analytics specifically, that's Facebook as a platform, giving you access to their walled garden and saying, “hey, here's the Facebook page that you have. Here's the posts and here's who's actually reacting to posts, commenting or sharing”. And what's really nice about a tool like Facebook Analytics is not only does it give you visibility into the actual on page statistics, whereas before you don't really have that, you can actually tie that to your website, because obviously for a lot of people, it's yes, she's creating stuff on Facebook, but ultimately it's to create a traffic source for their website or for the organization. And so with Facebook Analytics, you can measure and you can see, well, how many people are actually sharing my post actually end up making that donation or signing up for my form or you know, purchasing the things that I'm trying to purchase on my site. And you can tie the activities that are happening inside Facebook as a platform to something that's happening on your site. And that's the biggest difference between kind of where it was and where it is now. It is that evolution of being able to see all of the house steps kind of, lifting under the hood and seeing what's going on. In fact in 2019, I believe, is when Facebook started opening up to Instagram. Because obviously they own Instagram. And so now that you can see a little bit more of what's going on with your Instagram posts and messenger bots and all sorts of stuff that's happening in social media, that before you really couldn’t see and know if it was working or not. Not really. You can get some of the results, but you really couldn't see the house. Now you can see really fine detail to see, “well, I made this post and how many people unfollowed me after this post or how many people followed me” that saw this post? You know, that saw this post. That's the sort of stuff that you can actually see now using tools like Facebook Analytics.
Elyse:
When it comes to understanding how much of a benefit social media is to us, Mercer says it really depends on our goals. Sometimes it can be hard to know exactly what goal to prioritize, or even what our goal is exactly on social media. And that’s okay too. You can always start with an objective like increasing awareness.
Mercer:
But if you can say, “hey, here's how many people I made aware of our thing that we're trying to promote. Here's how many of those people actually clicked to get more information. And here's how many those people actually got the information. And now we've got an audience of people who have the information wanted to get”. Now, what else can we say to them? And you can create that conversation. Keep that conversation going. Remember, when it comes to measurement marketing, it's all about listening for what they're doing and responding back, keeping the conversation going.
Elyse:
It's good to think about social media interaction as you would an in-person conversation. In that sense, social media analytics are actually more intuitive than we may expect.
Mercer:
I would say that communication is key in the world, right? Communication is key to improve relationships. Communication is key to make sure that relationships are moving forward and not splitting apart and fracturing going in a million different directions. And marketing is communication. And so when you're out there and you're communicating what you're doing and you're trying to reach a certain audience, you need to be able to measure that communication. Just like when you're talking to somebody, you want to look into their eyes. You want to get feedback. You want to know is what I'm saying actually landing? Do they have questions? You pay attention to their body language. You can do the same thing with social media metrics. Even with something like the Pages Insights report, it can give you an idea as to what's working, what's not. And if you're actually having the impact that you want to have.
Elyse:
So taking the time to really understand social media analytics is worth it. And if we don’t prioritize this step in our digital communications strategy, Mercer says we risk two big things.
Mercer:
One, is you risk the fact that all of the efforts that you're putting out there are not working at all, in which case you're just wasting your time. The second thing you risk, is that the efforts that you are putting out there are completely working, but you have no idea that they're working. And so you don't know to do more of them, and so you miss out on opportunities. And so you need to know what's working and what's not and in measuring using social media metrics and paying attention to those and measuring kind of what your results are and how you're getting those results, and you can see the conversation that you're having with those users on the site. It helps to guide your future actions.
Elyse:
All of this can be hard to navigate, but Mercer says don’t sweat it. It’s not about being perfect. After all, the purpose of understanding social media analytics is to have the information we need so that we can improve our practices.
Mercer:
The most important thing out of all of this is just focus on getting good enough to get going. There's a million different ways to do this stuff. So don't worry about all those different ways. Just focus on what you can focus on. In your Facebook pages it'll probably be the Page Insights report that will give you the most feedback. You don't need to set it up. It's already back there. You just need to click on it. And if you're an admin of the page you can do that. And so going back into that Page Insights report and paying attention and asking yourself the questions, what's working and what's not. So how many people am I actually aware of the things I want them to be aware of? How many actually engaged with me in those different messages? Do more of what gets more engagement. Do less of what get less engagement. And keep it as simple as that. And you will start to see that you will build a trend and you'll start to get better, better results from your efforts.
Elyse:
Measuring the impact of our efforts on social media is easier than ever. With social media analytics we now have the tools to help us understand our audience and build stronger relationships with them. And if you approach this step-by-step, all this information can be really empowering. We now have a blueprint as to how to strengthen our efforts and set benchmarks, and we have a better idea of which areas to focus on moving forward. So no need to stress. All the information we need is literally at our fingertips .
This episode of Digital What!? is produced by Oscar Durand and myself. Our theme music is by Lemon Guo, and additional music is by Chris Zabriskie. Sound design by myself. Special thanks to Mercer of Measurement Marketing Dot IO for taking the time to speak with us. To listen and subscribe go to wherever you find your podcasts or DigitalNow dot UNDP dot org.
I’m Elyse Blennerhassett. Thanks for joining us.