A how-to guide to measure MySpace and Facebook

Posted by Paulette

Jan 26

MySpace and Facebook are the two most popular social networking sites, offering users the ability to create a network of friends, political contacts and business associates with which to share messages, photos and videos.

MySpace and Facebook are used by millions of people to converge and converse around mutual interests. If you happen to be in charge of PR or promotion for something of value to one of those interests, MySpace and Facebook allow you instant access to a potential fan base for your product. Additionally, by listening to the conversations you can get ideas and feedback on how to improve your products or services.

We discuss MySpace and Facebook here because they are the most generally popular, but there are a great many similar sites, each with their own focus and particular audience and interests. Depending on your organization’s goals or products, you may want to investigate several. Here is a list of about 125 of them.

Is MySpace/Facebook the place for you?

Should you put up a profile? Should you participate in a group? How do you know if it will work for you?

MySpace/Facebook networks form and are maintained based on some mutual interest of the members. If you hope to attract the attention of these members, then here has to be a reason for those people to make connections with you.

Maybe it is to get physical stuff (so you provide them with free coupons or samples, for instance), or maybe it is to have access to information, (so you provide them with news or inside-the-scene conversations). If there is no need for what you can provide—or if you will provide nothing—then you don’t need to be there.

Most important thing: If people don’t gather around you in the real world, they won’t do it online. And remember, if you set up a network and then stop using it, then it will die. So don’t start what you aren’t going to maintain.

So, the first step is to figure out what’s already out there: What communities have already formed around your market, product or area of interest?

Your five-minute MySpace/Facebook monitoring program

If your only interest in MySpace/Facebook is to monitor it for activity that may be or may indicate a problem for your organization, then here’s your quick and easy monitoring solution.

Go to the sites and do a quick search to see if anyone is talking about your company or product. (In MySpace you can do a text search for your company, organization or product name. In Facebook, as things stand now, you can’t search text, so search for groups, then read what the groups are talking about.)

If no one is talking about you, then repeat your search every couple days or so. And you can tell your boss you are monitoring MySpace/Facebook.

If they are talking about you, (or your products or your people or whatever may be important to your organization), read the posts and make a simple “problem/not-a-problem” decision. Divide the posts into “we-would-approve” or “we-would-not-approve” piles.

If what they are saying is not a problem, put it in a file and keep track of the themes or positive messages to learn what you are doing right. If what they are saying is a problem, then decide if it is a little problem or a big problem. If it is a small problem, put it in a file, keep track of the themes or negative messages expressed, and be prepared to discuss specific points and trends. If it is a big problem, call your boss and swing into crisis mode.

Worst case scenario: One of your periodic searches finds a big problem—something important that you have to deal with immediately. First, congratulate yourself that you identified it in such a timely fashion. Then warn your boss and swing into full crisis mode. Odds are that dealing with this will involve a full blown response in several media.

Why measure?

There are three basic reasons to measure MySpace/Facebook:

You are thinking of putting up a page, and you want to know best practices.
You have put up a page up and you want to know if it achieved your objectives.
You want to measure your own profile, or that of your competition. In other words: What are other peoples’s pages saying about you? And should you really care?

Here’s how:

1. You are thinking of putting up a page, and you want to know best practices.

Do not just jump in and create a page. First determine what the environment is for your product or service and how people are already discussing it.

Consider this real-life example: A manufacturer of plastic cups wanted to have visibility on Facebook as a way to recruit new talent, so they were about to set up a page. First they checked out their presence there and found a lot of existing visibility—mostly pretty raunchy photographs of students and lots and lots of cups filled with beer.

Turns out that their products are the preferred brand for playing Beirut or beer pong. Not necessarily a bad thing, but worth evaluating as to whether those are the types of future employees the company wanted to attract.

When you set up your page, keep your page’s objectives in line with what you (or, more importantly, your bosses) want to communicate about your company or products. The point here is that when you start measuring your page, you want to be able to demonstrate that you communicated what you were supposed to.

2. I put up a profile: Is it working? Are we achieving our objectives?

To get started, you can assume that your presence is working if it communicates the right messages to a sufficient number of the right people. (And if you determine that your presence is not working, then try another site.) Eventually you will want to determine a definition of “working” that is specific to your organization and situation.

Now do an audit of your profile or group:

Profile audit

Analyze your profile, images, postings, affiliations and connections (friends). You want to demonstrate to your executives that your profile communicates the company messages.

Reach: You probably started your profile to reach a certain market segment. So, are you doing it? What people are your friends? How many, and of what sort? Look at a sample of them. On average people have 150 to 200 connections, so that is a healthy amount. If you have less than that, then you are new and the number of your connections is growing. Or perhaps it’s not the right site for you.

How do you know if they’re just not into you? If you’ve got less than 150 friends, then you probably ought to look somewhere else for your network. Your friends’ profiles should be the same as your ideal customer profiles or those of your stakeholder groups.

Groups audit

You want groups that relate to your organization. How many people belong to those groups (reach)? What are their demographics? What information is given on the group landing page?

Are there existing groups about you? If so, join them, don’t start your own (because what’s important is the network, not you). Read up and analyze their discussions. Find out who posts the most and what they talk about. Are they your target customer demographic?

Response times: If it takes less than a day for someone to answer a question, it’s an active group. If it takes more than a day and a half, it’s not very active, and can be thought of as less valuable or important.

3. Measure what other peoples’s pages say about you.

Discussion

Analyze discussions like you would YouTube comments. To what extent do they indicate you are achieving your original objectives? Check to see if they indicate any other important sentiments or reactions that you did not anticipate. Classify them by discussion and subjects:

Positive or negative responses to your organization, brand or products
Demonstrations of increased brand strength of loyalty
Unusual engagement with product or company

Metrics

1. Who are they?

A key measure of success of any communications program is whether or not you are reaching your target audience. To determine this you need to look at the profiles of the most active members of the group. You may not get information on all of them, but a quick examination of the members’ profiles will give you a sense of whether or not this is the sort of crowd you want to have a conversation with.

2. What are they talking about? What information are they passing along?

By monitoring and analyzing the postings, you’ll get a sense of what information is appropriate. Just as you wouldn’t go to a cocktail party designed to raise money for the opera and start talking loudly about why people should give money to your favorite presidential candidate, you want to make sure that what you have to say is relevant and interesting to the people conducting the conversation.

3. How do those things relate to your brand or product or objectives?

You may well have to tailor your messages and/or product offerings to the interests of the specific group. Make sure that management is prepared to do so.

Active public vs. inactive publics: What percent are active, that is making posts, talking with other users, re-posting what you posted? It may sound obvious, but you will need to prioritize your efforts, focusing on those people that are most active and participatory.

Katie Paine is president of KDPaine & Partners. Peter Kowalski and Bill Paarlberg contributed to this article.