Social Media Measurement- Part 1
To start this social measurement series off I’m going to cover multiple services that can help a user monitor and create metrics for their social interactions. These tools can be used not only to monitor a specific user but to also measure competitors and social gurus involvement in social media.
The first tool that I will cover in this series is BackType (@backtype), which indexes comments from around the web. I was lucky to have Christopher Gold, founder of BackType, answer a few questions about his company.
How did this whole project start?
“We wanted to be able to follow comments written by the people we care about. It was easy to follow all the blog posts, videos, tweets, and other user-generated content, but there was no way to follow comments. Despite having much greater ambition for the service today, we created BackType to solve a very simple problem we were experiencing.”
Why did you choose indexing comments?
“We believe online conversations are an overlooked and increasingly important subset of information online. Commenting is a ubiquitous online activity that creates, in our opinion, incredibly valuable (meta)data. An individual comment or review may have little value or meaning — but aggregating millions of them creates lots of context for consumers. For example, comment-like data is one of the top drivers of purchase decisions. We saw an opportunity to organize that information.”
How can people leverage your program?
“BackType is primarily used as a toolset for comment authors, but it’s also used by companies for customer support, public relations, etc. We have a feature called “BackType Alerts” that notifies you whenever someone mentions a search term in comments on blogs and other social media. When existing and potential customers talk about your brand, products or services, it’s important that you see it, and when appropriate, respond accordingly.”
How it can compliment the use of other metrics?
“For both publishers and marketers, the number of comments in response or connection to content of interest is a good starting point for measuring engagement. However, there are many more forms of engagement that can be measured, analyzed, etc. All “social metrics” are complementary to each other — it just depends which ones are most valuable to you.”
Comments are about building community and simplistically provide a way for people to contribute to your community. Whether it’s a community that you are trying to build and/or an existing community that you are engaging in, this part of social measurement is vital because social media is dependent on engagement. Measurement of engagement is not limited to “how many comments” a user receives however each comment can lead to something more such as ideas for improvement, measurement of sentiment, and hopefully conversations. To show you how engagement can move beyond a comment people can Digg your post, bookmark it through social bookmarkings sites, stumble it, or even share it through Facebook or other existing social networking platforms.
As you can see monitoring comments to analyze your social media projects is not an all-encompassing solution. However it’s a starting point to what kind of “strong ties” you are making with your community. There are many other tools that can be used to measure comments and we’ll cover those later. Nevertheless, if you have the time try BackType because familiarizing yourself with this tool will help you understand how it can be leveraged in your niche. As we dive into the social measurement toolbox you will start to notice that each application is different in how they assess the social world.
