Social Elephants uses universal metrics to allow the direct comparison between different social networks.

The nomenclature of each social network might change a bit and some important KPIs are specific of a social network, but we always try to present data always in the same way.


Below you can find the exact definitions for each social network, but we would like to give a general definition for some of the most important KPIs:


  • ENGAGEMENT: the number of social interactions divided by the number of posts (published in the selected period of time) and by the community size. Social Elephants only accounts for publicly visible social interactions, i.e. it does not include interactions on the posts shared on personal profiles or other clicks. The division is by the total community size, not by the number of people actually reached, since the Reach metric is not public. The division of interactions by Reach (i.e. Reach Engagement) is only available as part of the insights of owned channels.


  • SHARE OF VOICE (SoV): it's the fraction of social conversations of a social profiles as a percentage over the total social conversations of the social profiles analyzed in the KPIs table. A social conversation (or social story) is the viral result of interacting with a post of a social profile ("Mark commented on the post of...", "Mark likes the photo published by.."), mentioning a social profile or publishing on its home.

A good Share of Voice is the combined result of:

  1. having a big community size 

  2. publishing a lot of content

  3. having a good engagement 

We can define the Share of Voice somewhat like the "Social" equivalent of the Share of Market. If a brand is the leader in terms of Share of Market, we expect its social profiles to be leaders on Share of Voice. 


  • NORMALIZED SHARE OF VOICE (Norm. SoV): we saw that SoV can be tweaked with 3 parameters, but one of them cannot be really controlled straightaway. A brand can suddenly increase the amount of content published or improve the strategy to gain a better engagement, but it's unlikely that a bit community size can be achieved in a short span of time. Some social profiles might have intrinsically a reduced audience and they are not expected to grow their community much, for example consider the case of some competitors addressing a specific local market. 

The Normalized SoV expresses what the SoV of a social profile would be, if all the social profiles in the table had the same community size. This metric is extremely significant to evaluate the performance of a new emerging competitor or to detect some big brand that are generating high volume of social conversations just because they have a big community, despite being weak in terms of content generation and engagement.


Here the complete list of KPIs for each social network with the specification of some metrics which are unique for each platform: 


FACEBOOK:


  • Visitor Posts: only available for Facebook, it's the number of posts by users who publish on the facebook page wall or just mention the facebook page publicly. 




TWITTER:


  • Conversations/day: on Twitter it's quite common for a social profile to start a conversation by addressing a user (the tweet starts with "@"); this kind of brand posts are not meant to generate engagement (they have limited reach)  and they rather reflect the activity of customer service of a social profile. 


  • @mentions: it's not the same naming a social profile as a response to a tweet (@reply) or mentioning it spontaneously. Replies account for the engagement of the community with the content published by a social profile, while @mentions reflect how notorious a social profile is. 

example: a brand inactive on Twitter won't get any replies and its engagement can be zero, but it can still have a lot of mentions.


⚠️  Important note on the Twitter Engagement formula:


Social Elephants is very accurate when calculating the engagement of a Twitter Account and social profiles that have high activity of tweets dedicated to the social customer care are not penalized.


  • @mentions are not considered to be interactions with a tweet of a social profile, so they are not included in the calculation of the engagement. Nevertheless @mentions are important when the overall Share of Voice is calculated. 

  • When dividing the interactions by the number of Tweets, the direct conversations of the social profiles are not accounted for, since those tweets are not meant or expected to generate engagement.



INSTAGRAM:



YOUTUBE: 


  • On YouTube the community size (subscribers) is not always that relevant, while the main KPI is definitely the number of views. For this reason the YouTube benchmark includes some unique metrics derived by the views: View Engagement, Share of Views and Norm. Share of Views.