In order to make sense of social data and understand engagement brands and agencies need to change their recruitment strategies and hire more staff with an understanding of data and analytics, according to a new whitepaper from specialist social agency, Yomego.
Emerging from a roundtable event held this summer, Yomego’s ‘The 10 big issues around social media engagement’ found brands and marketers are still too focussed on ‘micro metrics’ – likes, follows, etc. – and this is holding back their progress on getting to the root of social engagement and developing metrics around it.
“Working in digital, we are used to everything being measurable. But now we have too much data and we are lacking the analysts to make sense of it. We’ve lost the DM techniques that served us so well — the A/B testing. Now many analysts only know how to write reports,” comments Ivan Fernandez of Mediacom Worldwide in the report.
MD at Yomego, Steve Richards, added: “Calculating of some sort of metric for social is starting to become ever more important. Not having one is holding the sector back and keeping budgets low.
“When online advertising, TV, radio, outdoor and all the rest have metrics that allow you to put in spend at one end and have a reasonable guess at the ROI out the other, then you can see the problem that social is grappling with…in terms of anything concrete, it doesn’t yet exist – but we are now working on it.”
The whitepaper states that “social needs a plausible model if it to achieve what it is capable of and punch its weight in budget allocation.” According to the report at the roundtable the group were unanimous in agreement that there is a gap between what brands are trying to achieve in terms of “developing relationships and understanding engagement, and the tools and information available to them.”
Roundtable member, Richard Bowden from British Airways, continued: “How can we work together with the platforms when their metrics aren’t robust enough to track against our objectives or our aims? We need to reach out to companies like Facebook and ask for their advice going forward. This is a huge opportunity for the platforms too.”
The whitepaper calls for “social media advocates, practitioners — and sceptics — to work together to find a credible model to quantify the value of social engagement,” Yomego is taking the learnings further to develop a metric and will be holding a further series of events to develop these ideas further.