June 25, 2019
How is my brand’s social media performing? How much of the conversation does my brand own? How do people feel about my brand? On which channels are people talking about my brand? Does my social media influence key customers and stakeholders? These are all critical questions you should ask about your social media efforts from time to time. If you haven’t been confident in answering these questions, your social media presence may be missing the mark. So, which social media metrics matter most?
A powerful way to see the gaps and opportunities in your social media performance is through a social media SWOT analysis.
SWOT, of course, stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. A social media SWOT analysis answers the questions above by focusing on priority areas related to your social media.
1. Mentions & Engagement
Mentions count the number of times your brand is discussed on social media. Are you leading the pack amongst your peers? Trailing behind? Being discussed related to topics important to your brand or products? By studying mentions, you can see the context of your mentions and adjust your strategy accordingly.
Engagement is an indicator of how well your content performs. Generally, social media engagement is measured by the number of likes and comments a post receives, showing the degree to which your content resonates with your audience. You might learn that engagement isn’t as strong as you’d like and begin testing content variations to improve performance.
2. Net Sentiment & Passion
Net sentiment provides visibility into the ratio of positive, negative and neutral conversation about your brand. If you’re dealing with customer service issues, a crisis, an event or otherwise, net sentiment can drill down to these specific areas and help you determine how your constituents are feeling about your brand overall or related to specific sub-topics.
Passion index combines conversation volume with sentiment and strength of emotion. It allows you to see where opportunities exist to strengthen sentiment, volume and make a deeper connection with your audiences.
3. Conversation Channels
By analyzing conversation channels, you can determine where your brand and related topics are discussed. Understanding this information gives you the opportunity to focus your efforts on social media channels through which conversation is already happening about your brand and related topics.
4. Share of Voice
By understanding your share of voice relative to your competition, you can determine where you need to ramp up efforts in content development, drive more engagement or consider a paid social program and more. If you’re seeing that you’re well behind your competition or if your competition is catching up to you over time, data can help you make the case for more resources.
Within all these priority areas, it’s important to watch how the data evolves and trends over time as well as compare your brand against your top peers. Having a process in place to review this information regularly offers the opportunity for discussion, analysis and continual improvement. Many tools exist to pull the data together into a dashboard.
At Dix & Eaton, we apply creative thinking and use a variety of social media listening technologies coupled with in-depth analysis to answer strategic questions and to improve your social media performance.
You can request a complimentary social media SWOT analysis from Dix & Eaton now.
