How to measure your nonprofit’s Return on Engagement

Last month I spoke at the Social Media for Nonprofits conference in New York on creating and measuring return on engagement (ROE). In fact, social media engagement should have been the untitled conference theme. Almost every speaker presented a case study or spoke about his or her use of social media for successful engagement, from how to use video to engage (charity: water’s September Birthday campaign) to how to create multi-channel fundraising engagement (Big Duck).

And you know what? They’re right. Without engagement, social media ultimately fails. However, you can design your social media activities to create online engagement. My conference presentation covered five core concepts about how to design real online engagement for the highest return on engagement:

1. Numbers do not equal return on engagement (see this post on the Case of the 4,000 Twitter Followers Who Don’t Care).
2. You can design social media activities for real engagement.
3. How to leverage relationship ties organizationally to convert fans to superfans (and increase ROE).
4. Align SMART goals with social media design
5. Three approaches to measuring Return on Engagement: community commitment, fan trust and SMART goal achievement.

Trust and reciprocity are key to results

When researching data and gathering ideas for the presentation, what really struck me were two related ideas:

• A co-creation strategy resonates with your fans and encourages the highest levels of real engagement.

This study on the true value of social media clearly demonstrates that a user-generated content strategy and co-creation strategy moves more fans to influence a purchase and talk about brands than any other type of social media action.

• A successful co-creation strategy relies on two of the four elements of social tie strength: trust and reciprocity.

Organizations can easily leverage trust and reciprocity, two of the four elements (the other two being time and intensity) to create stronger ties with online stakeholders. Examples of trust and reciprocity include: online authenticity and transparency, real sharing of organizational thinking and decisions, fans helping each other within a shared group, organizations asking fans for their opinions. All of these are real engagement activities that strengthen relationships because they demonstrate an organization’s ability to offer reciprocity and extend trust.

Combine trust and reciprocity with co-creation. What do you have? Engagement.

Three critical measurements for Return on Engagment

The last part of my presentation is an approach to social media measurement.  I see three important measurements:

1. Did you meet your SMART goals? Is the online community taking the intended actions that you want them to take? Defining the goals that your organization wants to achieve is critical – it’s how you will ultimately know whether or not your social media strategy and activities are working.

2. The Return on Engagement of fan commitment and trust. There are three levels of fan commitment: Making a simple, non-intensive action (Liking your page, joining your group, following), active engagement (RTing, conversation, uploading content, sharing your content), and making a deeper commitment (taking a pledge, joining a planning group, donating money, volunteering). The deeper commitment usually relates the action you want them to take (see “Did you meet your SMART goals?” above). Track the numbers of fans at each level and how successful you are at increasing these numbers.

3. The ROE of community commitment. This measurement is trying to get at how committed the community as a whole is. As social media measurement expert Lauren Vargas told me, “give management a number that they can hang their hat on.” It makes perfect sense. Instead of reviewing a spreadsheet of many different trends and statistics, combine them into a number that represents the totality of your measurements. Slide 32 of the slide deck talks about defining the discrete metrics that capture fan engagement, assigning weights to them (they have to add up to 100, but you can’t have them all weigh the same), and creating an overall weighted community commitment score. How this score changes weekly is the community commitment benchmark.

(Credit to Lauren Vargas for inspiring this measurement approach.)

I’d love to hear your thoughts on designing and measuring online engagement.

The post Design your social media activities to create engagement appeared first on Socialbrite.

Participation is the key for getting value out of your Facebook Pages

Target audience: Nonprofits, NGOs, cause organizations, social enterprises, brands, businesses, Web publishers, individuals.

I‘ve been digging deep into research about Facebook fan activity lately, in preparation for a few upcoming presentations about social media return on engagement and Facebook engagement. I was delighted to find recent research about Facebook fan engagement from Michael Wu at Lithium and from comScore. Placed together, this research offers three very practical takeaways for nonprofits and brands managing Facebook fan Pages: relevant benchmarks of how deeply fans engage with Pages, the effect of fans on website visits, and how likely fans are to engage with your organization’s services or purchase items.

Basic benchmarks for measuring fan activity

1Michael Wu posits that “fan count is only the most superficial characterization of engagement, because it says nothing about the fans’ subsequent action and their interactions.” To measure the real engagement of a fan Page, Michael looked at different levels of fan engagement: active fans (who comment or post a message on a page), what fraction of posts have comments, amount of interaction among fans on a Page, and number of unique fans per conversation. From his research, he found these Page engagement benchmarks:

• The number of active fans per day (i.e. actively engaging) is about 3.45% of total page fans.
• About two-thirds of all posts do receive some activity, but it is normal to expect that around one-third will never receive comments and disappear quickly from a person’s newsfeed.
• Most Facebook fans are not very loyal to the fan Pages. Only about 30% of the active fans re-engage with the fan Page more than once (i.e. through posting).
• The probability of a fan returning to the same conversation on the fan Page is low, only about 9.6%.

If a fan never interacts with your Page’s content, then the reach of the Page will never grow, either. The more interactions, the more friends of fans will see your content. This correlates to the comScore research, next.

The role of the newsfeed

2Facebook users primarily interact with a fan Page in the newsfeed. What this means is that most fans don’t ever visit the actual fan Page. How often a fan or a friend of a fan will see your Page content within the newsfeed is determined by how often the actual post is shared, interacted with, and Liked. (See J.D. Lasica’s article for an in-depth look at how EdgeRank works.)

The new comScore report “The Power of Like” offers solid data on why fan activity with a Page is so important: reach. This report is focused on how people interact with the top 100 brands, with deeper analysis of a few large brands.

• Facebook users spend 25% of their time on Facebook interacting with their newsfeed. In May, 27 percent of engagement on Facebook.com occurred on the homepage and newsfeed, followed by profile viewing (21 percent), photo viewing (17 percent) and usage of apps and tools (10 percent).
• Facebook users are 40 to 150 times more likely to see branded content in the newsfeed than to visit the fan Page itself.
• Friends of fans is an important potential segment for organizations to reach. Friends of fans typically represent a much larger set of consumers (34 times larger, on average, for the top 100 brand pages) and may receive social media brand impressions through their Facebook friends. In the graph below, you can see that for every fan that visits Starbucks’ Facebook fan Page, 156 others see the brand Page’s updates through the newsfeed.

To reach more friends of fans, post to Facebook more frequently. Each incremental day of publishing branded content from the Facebook Page increases the reach among fans by about 2.5 percent.

Facebook fans equal website visitors

3Big implications here for nonprofits! Fans and friends of fans are much more likely to visit an organization’s website than the average Internet user. In the comScore report, for example, Bing fans are 55% more likely to visit the website and friends of Bing fans are 33% more likely to visit the website than the average Internet user. Other research shows that consumers use a combination of search and social media to research before making a purchase, and the effect of exposure of a brand to likelihood to purchase.

Interestingly, the comScore report shows that fans and friends of fans are more likely to spend more per transaction at the store and to have more frequent transactions. I believe you can reasonably assume from the data that those who Like your page are more likely to take these actions.

While Facebook engagement data from Lithium tells us a lot about how fans engage with your Page’s content, the comScore data illustrates how engaging data can potentially affect website visits, purchasing, and engagement with your organization’s services. The key, of course, is creating engaging, relevant, shareable content.

How does this data compare with your experience managing and/or interacting with a fan Page?

Resources

• Quantifying Facebook Engagement: More than Just Counting Fans and Like (Michael Wu, Lithium)

• 

Are Your Facebook Fans Real Fans? (Michael Wu, Lithium)

• The Power of Like: How Brands Reach and Influence Fans Through Social Media Marketing (comScore)

• Four-part series on how to use Facebook strategically (Socialmedia.biz)

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