4 Ways to Benchmark Your Social Media Data

If analyzing social media data is part of your job, you’ve likely faced the “so what” question that comes from vanity metrics (addressed in an article written by our CMO). And, if you’re a marketer, you most likely experience this on a weekly basis. The measurement of a campaign’s success or even your audience’s interests can be difficult to interpret without proper secondary data. How are you measuring and benchmarking social media data, to measure your campaign’s success?

There are a variety of ways to benchmark your social media data, some are more helpful than others, and some should only be used in conjunction with other data. Below is a list of the top four ways to benchmark your social data to get the most out of it.

1. Competitive Benchmarking

Many of our customers our SynthesioRank proprietary metrics for measuring an influencers level of influence, as well as to benchmark campaign metrics against their competitors. Our tool allows them to not only measure the visibility and reach of individuals, but it can also measure sites and specific posts as well, which can easily show you the success of an influencer’s post.

Competitive benchmarking is a great start to analyzing your social media data. Another meaningful thing to measure is the sustained level of buzz through benchmarking mention volume for your campaign at different key times (for example, before, after initial launch, in the middle of the campaign, towards the end of the campaign and after) to determine the reach you’ve created and sustained through the work you are doing with the social media influencers. This, obviously works even better if you benchmark all of your social campaigns so that you can really see how it compares to other campaigns. It is crucial to constantly benchmark every social campaign you work on, for all sorts of data and insights into your campaign.

Social media data can now help your team understand your brand’s audience audience, so you can create campaign materials that will strategically focus on audience interests.

2. Find Industry Norms: Target Demographics, Psychographics, Geographics & Interests

Comparing two competing brands is insightful, but it’s important to realize that it still consists of a consolidated view of users who mentioned one of the companies in very different regional and global markets, so comparing their profiles to all of Twitter could potentially be less accurate than if we further segment the data by market.

With the use of a Social Intelligence platform, brands are able to segment social media data by culture and region. This leads to new, more accurate insights and reveals the different interest affinities. For example, in different regions, you will see different levels of interest for football. This will help you understand which regions will respond best to a football ad. By strategically targeting campaigns with targeted messaging, you will build better relationships with your audience.

3. Paid vs. Organic Social Media Campaigns

By using a Social Intelligence platform, companies are able to break down their social media data by time period and region to find campaign metrics. First, it is important to set up two separate strategies, one for paid social media campaigns and one for organic social media campaigns. By measuring the social data from your Social Intelligence platform, you can then measure the success of your paid versus your organic social media campaigns and see where you are getting the most bang for your buck.

4. Aspirational Benchmarking

Each social media marketing campaign has goals and objective that it’s trying to obtain. What is the purpose of each campaign and what is their brand trying to achieve? To start each campaign, clearly list out your aspirational benchmarks. After the campaign is over, you can then see how well your campaign did against those aspirational benchmarks. If you exceeded those benchmarks, it’s good to continue with the same strategy. If you under delivered, you can then find areas of improvement.

For more information about how Synthesio’s Social Intelligence platform can help brands benchmark success, check out our ebook: Measuring Sentiment and Benchmarking Success: A Guide to Synthesio’s Social Reputation Score.

Request a demo with our team to learn about how social intelligence can meet your specific business needs.