How Are Your Accounts Measuring Social Media Success? -

Social media provides an effective way for brands to communicate with consumers and build loyalty. And the social media format is capturing a larger share of marketers’ media budget. This form of marketing can’t be done in a vacuum. To be sure the investment is generating a return, your accounts should be measuring social media success.

Recently Unilever CEO Fernando Fernandez announced his organization’s commitment to increase social media spending. He encourages the marketers in his organization to focus on the 4Vs of social media. During an earnings call, Fernandez said Unilever will emphasize – variety of creators, volume, virality and velocity of content. In doing so, the company’s brand managers will have a “machine of demand creation.”

If Mr. Fernandez’ initiative works, his brand managers will be measuring social media success. If your clients want to try the same strategy, you’ll need to educate them on the latest social media mnemonics.

More than one group is setting up mnemonic systems to outline their social marketing strategy. Last year, Merag Shazad, discussed her 4 Cs of social media marketing in a Forbes column. The 4Vs of social media marketing can be an effective way to help your accounts.

The Unilever CEO isn’t the first to talk about the 4 Vs of social media. In 2020, researchers reported on the 4Vs of data and social media. In that study, the focus was political communication. The researchers identified the factors as volume, variety, velocity and veracity. Even then researchers began to see how traditional mass media wasn’t capturing “attention.” But social media was. And that ability to capture attention was partly due to creating and interacting with marginalized groups.

Each of the 4Vs should be incorporated into your accounts’ social media strategy. If your accounts don’t have a cohesive social strategy, these elements can provide a solid start point.

Virality

Everyone dreams of having their social post go viral. The virality of a post is all about the content moving quickly through the social media ecosystem. When a business gets it right, a piece of marketing content that goes viral can provide benefits for years.

Should your accounts strive to achieve viral status with social content? And how much does it matter? Emanuele Sangiorgio and a group of researchers studied the impact of viral events on engagement.

They advise against trying to make content achieve viral status. Instead, they suggest aiming for, “a solid and enduring connection with the user base through organic and continued growth strategies.” Otherwise, the cost to achieve viral status might outpace the benefits, especially because marketers must battle with individual creators in the attention economy.

When an Outsider's Content Pushes a Brand in Viral Mode

Brands should pay attention if someone posts content that goes viral. This can happen if the brand surfaces in a news report.

If an individual content creator posts a negative message about a brand and begins to win widespread consumer accolades, a brand’s reputation can suffer. Brands may choose a variety of responses, including showing no reaction. They may hope the virality of the moment will pass. Or they may decide to engage in a positive way with protesters.

In other cases, as happened with Budweiser’s use of a transgender influencer, they can try to minimize the damage. In Budweiser’s case, taking action to satisfy protesters was not enough to quickly recover lost sales.

Variety of Creators

Even small marketers may target more than one audience. In the past, a company may have aligned itself with one spokesperson or influencer in an attempt to unify their message. In their search for authenticity, marketers now use multiple influencers. And they encourage influencers to operate as content creators. Brands typically approve the content before it is released.

Each content creator works in a niche and shares information with their followers. In this way, the brands expand their reach beyond their existing audience. As they expand their audience, they’ll be measuring social media success instead of failure.

Velocity

Velocity is all about how quickly the engagement with brand content is changing. And that velocity includes shares and likes, etc. When measuring social media success, the higher the velocity, the better.

Brands can experience varying velocity based on the content type. Some content is quickly shared because it is a breaking news story with a short life. Other content such as an evergreen story might have steady velocity for several months or years.

Your accounts should explore using multiple types of content to engage with a variety of consumers.

Volume

Marketers must find a cadence of content production that results in satisfactory volume. The amount of content that consumers encounter continues to grow. Your accounts’ social media strategy should plan for how much content to develop and release.

The timing of the content release is important as a significant amount of consumer interaction typically occurs soon after it appears.

Posting more than three to seven times a week risks alienating the target audience. In addition, the posts should be done to drive engagement or provide value.

Brands can come up against what many of us know. It’s hard to get noticed anywhere, especially on social media. By some measures, the average brand “publishes 10 posts a day across social networks.” Even that level of activity doesn’t always drive engagement.

Brands aren’t just competing against rival businesses. They’re also trying to be noticed over what friends and family members are sharing on social sites.

To stand out, the brand content should be original. And when it comes in the form of “Edutainment” it speaks to the 65% of consumers who find it more entertaining than other forms.

Summary

The first step in helping your accounts with measuring social media success is to run a Digital Audit on AdMall. This tool provides a snapshot of where social media engagement should be improved, along with suggestions for other digital content marketing.