An Approach to Measuring Return on Investment on Social Content, especially Facebook pages, contests and content. https://iol.digital

1. An Approach to Measuring Social
Content and Communities
Varun Gambhir
November 21, 2011

2. In this Presentation
•
•
•
•
•
•
Background
Why measure
Proposed framework
Insights and Learning's
Your Thoughts
Annexure

3. Background
• We’re increasingly beginning to create richer content for
clients, especially for online and social media application
• These may range from short videos, info graphics, to other
image, video or sound content
• While the existing measurements vary as per the content
produced and the client, there exists no available framework
to measure and attach an RoI to the content we create
• This could be considered the same for social media on a
whole, and the following measurement framework can be
tweaked and used for online communities as well, if
agreeable to the team and client

4. Why measure?
• By tracking the return on investment for the content we
produce or the communities we manage, comparable to
others forms of media, we were able to:
– Better validate our work, value and creative concepts
– Showcase how it / we mostly outperform other forms of
media with larger community size (looking at the RoI)
– Marketing managers have the ability to measure social
head on with other forms of media

5. Proposed Framework
• By linking the measurements available for social, to that of
digital advertising, we’re able to arrive at an RoI for our
content and communities
• Essentially, we’re tracking as many social actions as relevant
to the client (or we make relevant for the client) – and draw
their digital advertising equivalents

6. Proposed Measurement Framework
Measurement
FB Impressions + Tab
Page Views
Ad Eq Value
Basis
What you’d expect to pay per 100 impressions on a
100
reasonably popular website for the key cities as
impressions =
your social community population
Rs. 2
Facebook Post Viewers
(Includes FB Likes,
Comments and Shares)
Rs 1 – View
Expected cost per SMS read when undertaking a
mobile marketing campaign
Image Views
Rs. 2 – View
Average cost per view when undertaking email
marketing campaigns
FB Page Visitors + FB App
Users
Rs.10 per
visitor CPC
What you’d pay Facebook for a click-based ad –
leading traffic back to your website, fan page or app
Video Views
Rs. 2 – View
What you’d pay YouTube per video view
Localized values in consultation with an online advertising professional at Komli Media,
APAC’s largest digital media network

7. Particulars
• For third party impressions, we use tools like Google Double Click
Ad planner to arrive at the monthly unique visitors, and divide that
by 30 assuming our content was on the front page for a day out of
the month
• For RIM we measure clicks on three platforms to best validate
which one to use, including bit.ly, using the link shortened on the
content mgmt platform (Syncapse's Social Talk) and adding CPIDs (a
tracking code for the Omniature website dashboard)
• We look to centralize all videos on YouTube, and publish to
different social platforms from there. This helps us centralize the
video views to one platform
• Facebook impressions, post views, page visitor and image views
can be taken from the insights dashboard
• Can use Crowdbooster to know Twitter impressions & engagement

8. Insights and learning’s
• When calculating the RoI, you’ll notice most of the return
comes from impressions, clicks and views. Engagement
parameters like Likes, Comments, Shares, etc don’t
individually add up to much (<10%) (they do drive total
impressions)
• First exploring the measurement framework around the
content we’d created for Facebook, we realized as a rule of
thumb, the larger the community, the larger the return.
– This helped us arrive at how we should budget for the content we
create. (e.g., if a video published to a fan page get’s 10k views avg,
then it’s safe to say a video production budget of $7.5k should be
allocated, as the return will support as much investment in richer
content)

9. Your Thoughts

10. Annexure

11. Ref Reading
• Virtue study pegging fan value – http://www.vitrue.com/360facebook-fan-valuation-is-just-the-tip-of-the-iceberg
• AD Week on the Virtue report –
http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/value-fan-socialmedia-360-102063
• Blog report capturing many povs and pointing in the direction
of linking the Virtue study to value for FB comments –
http://www.clickz.com/clickz/news/1691883/is-a-facebookfan-really-worth-usd360-social-marketers-debate
• Some valid arguments against the Virtue study –
http://www.communicationammo.com/meas/why-vitruesfacebook-fan-value-is-poppycock/

12. Known arguments and resolution
• While this is a proposed measurement framework to converse around
and see how best it can be made applicable to the individual client or
need, shared below are the criticisms I found online to the approach
and my arguments around them:
– Measurement is based / includes impressions and not how many people ‘saw’
the post – so is the case with most forms of advertising, including television,
print, radio, and website banners. All get sold per potential impressions, no
guarantee who actually ‘saw’
– In advertising the message is completely controlled, so is not always the case for
social media. So how can we value the impressions, engagement, etc the same?
– What’s proposed is a framework, and an idea towards making measurement of
social content possible. The exact values we assign can be based in agreement
– Isn’t measurement against the idea of social media? – As communicators, we
should know the effectiveness of each medium. Even if we don’t look at it from a
financial pov, we should know how the media as a whole performs the best we
can