Do you know what is the reputation, popularity and influence of your business on the web and social media?
Social media is increasingly becoming a key tool for consumers when looking for information about any brand, product or service.
The new opinion leaders find in the social media the main tool to preach for or against brands or products, so it is essential that we know what the perception and reputation of our brand in the media is, as well as online in general.
In countries like United States, these opinions broadcasted online fall under the concept of CGM, or Consumer-Generated Media and measurement methodologies are responsible for studying and analyzing the CGM from three main approaches:
- Reputation or brand awareness
- Brand Popularity
- Brand Influence
The process of monitoring and measuring our online reputation, brand popularity and influence can help us take strategic decisions as important as quality policies, pricing policies, marketing, distribution and even customer service. We have the opportunity to hear directly from our customers, and we must not waste it.
1) Measure the online reputation:
Even if the brand is not present in the social media by some planned action by itself is also very convenient to observe what they say about us.
Measuring our brand reputation requires continuously monitoring of our brand to know what our situation is before and after the campaign or for that matter an action that has been launched.
How can we measure reputation?
• Analyze and select the most relevant keywords that represent our business, sector or industry, and check our ranking with the search engines.
• What keywords give as a result our website?
• Based on our industry knowledge, we should choose the most current news, the markets on which we have the most presence or the news that the specialized media is talking about. This way, we can see if someone makes a remark about our company.
• Analyze the links pointing to our website (back link). Are there other websites, blogs, or media linking to us? In relation with what subjects?
• In addition we can also make a Benchmarking study comparing our company with our main competitors.
Why do we measure?
With the first thing we identify the most common subjects associated with our brand and what’s the point of view that these themes bring. Once we know “What are they talking about in our industry,” the company must ask, “what can bring our brand more to those subjects?
After this we will observe: where are directing traffic those subjects? And above all in relation to what subjects my web space is mentioned? Are these the topics that I want to be linked with? What images do they reflect or bring about my brand?
In this way what we do is prepare to enter the conversation and measure what is our share of participation in it (“Share of conversation”) and that translates into:
• From the hottest topics in my field: in how many we are the main ones?
• If you are the object of the conversation, are they talking about in a positive or negative manner?
• How many of these conversations have the presence of “our voice”?
• How many conversations have been started by ourselves?
• How many direct traffic to our website?
2) Measure the POPULARITY
By measuring our popularity, we refer to measure the impact of our presence in the social media:
1. In spaces that we control, such as our company blog.
2. In public spaces. Example: the micro blogging channel, or social network. It is not about the mention of others, but about our own brand activity in social media.
The key metric here is how we manage to engage our visitors to be active.
What should we measure?
Here is useful to distinguish between measuring our corporate blog, our webpage or profile page in each of the social networks where we are present.
In the case of a blog, evaluate only the number of visits is insufficient. The “involvement with the visitor,” usually can be measured in terms of:
• Number of subscribers.
• Average number of comments
• Percentage of repeated visitors
• Number of incoming links or recommendations
• Business/sales opportunities, etc, generated: what the brand gets by this online presence and that it knows this happened due to the buyer knew him through the blog.
In the case of our pages or profiles on social networks:
• Range: at how many people we get to in that network.
• Speed: Rate at which we increase the range.
• Recommendations: websites or users who link us or quote us as reference.
3) Measure the Influence
Our presence in social media should also seek to generate influence in our circle of supporters. For this we should measure how our message is expanding and on what extent our network members take our message to their own network.
The most important metric to consider is the speed with which new users are added.
The platform for which it have been developed more monitoring tools is Twitter.
