Measuring Social Media Engagement

So if your Facebook fan page has 2,000 fan interactions per week and mine only has 200, is there any way my page could be considered more engaging?  Why yes, absolutely there is.  What needs to be considered is the amount of interaction per fan, which puts all pages on an equalizing, pound-for-pound scale.  Basically, this enables an apples to apples comparison of your fan page with 2 million fans with my page of 200 fans.

It is often hard to measure how effective a campaign is and how engaged fans are in the conversation. A simple, albeit manual way to measure how involved fans are is by using the Social Media Engagement Scoring system that ranks a page based on posts per day to quantity of fans.  This system allows a brand to take a realistic view at how well they converse with their fans in comparison with other brands.

We have found that in general, a score of over 200 in Facebook means fans are engaged. A score over 300 means that fans are highly engaged.  A score of over 50 in Twitter is good.  A Twitter Engagement score of over 75 is superb.  Our calculations are simple (download an example here) and can be broken down into four easy steps for both Facebook and Twitter.

For Facebook:

Step 1 –  Decide how many days to count for (if an account is very active, than fewer days) and then extrapolate it to 1 month or whatever time period you prefer.  If the account is not terribly active it is easy to account for a whole week and sometimes even month.

Step 2 – Our  favorite part – counting. This is the most time consuming part. We count both interaction on admin posts and fan posts in Facebook. We count a post by an administrator plus any “like” of that post or comment on that post as an “Admin Interactions”.  For “Fan Interactions” we count any post by a fan on the wall  and any comments or “likes” of that post.  We sum those interactions and obtain the number of fans of that page.

Step 3 – Record these numbers in a spreadsheet such as the one we provided as an example above.

Step 4 – Run the numbers.  If you use our example (above) the formulas are already there (no calculation necessary!)  For Facebook we add up the number of interactions from admin posts and fan posts and convert that to a daily figure. After that we simply divide “Total Interactions/Day” by the number of fans and multiply that number by 100,000 to make the figure a bit more usable.  This will give you the Facebook Engagement Score for that page.

For Twitter:

Step 1 – Decide what time period you would like to account for. A week is the most practical for Twitter but you can also do daily. This is because the Twitter search function only maintains one week of results.

Step 2 – Count the number of @s (mentions of another user) on a given Twitter page for that time period.  After that number is obtained we find the number of times that Twitter page has been mentioned.  We use http://search.twitter.com to search how many times that twitter page has been referenced (See illustration below).  Again, this data only goes back one week so that limits the time period you can actually account for.

Using search.twitter to find mentions of any Twitter user

Step 3 – Record these numbers in a spreadsheet. Use our example from above.

Step 4 – Divide @s by mentions  and multiply by 100 to arrive at the Twitter Engagement Score.  (Calculations already done when using our downloadable example.

Now you will understand how a fan page with only a few dozen fan posts can be far more engaging than a page with thousands of fan posts.  Do you have anything to add?  Other ideas?  Let us know in the comments please.