Keeping your ear on the ground is vital when your brand’s main objective is to increase its digital presence. Thanks to brand monitoring tools, as a marketing professional now you can track your company’s online activity, keep an eye on reputation, Social Share of Voice and spy on competitors.
However, it would help to choose the right tool for the trade because brand monitoring tools differ in their capabilities. Some are more analytics-oriented, others combine monitoring with posting and scheduling features, some focus on a specific platform.
In my previous post, I alluded to the fact that if you want to increase awareness of your brand, you need a tool that will help you track and measure Social Share of Voice, brand mentions, social media engagement and share of engagement.
In this article, I will discuss one additional awareness metric that I feel carries the same weight as Social Share of Voice, brand mentions, social media sentiments, and social media engagement, and that is the social media conversation rate.
As mention in my previous post titled “How to track and measure Social Share of Voice, brand mentions, social media engagement and share of engagement“, Social Share of Voice measures how many people are mentioning your brand on social media compared to your competitors and social media audience sentiment looks at emotions behind your brand mentions measuring people’s attitudes and feelings regarding your brand.
What is the social media conversation rate?
The conversation rate is a metric coined by Google’s Digital Marketing Evangelist, Avinash Kaushik. He explains that it is a ratio of comments per post (or video or tweet or pin etc.) to overall Followers (or Page Likes).
Tracking your conversation rate will help uncover how much of your followers find it necessary to add their voice to the content you post and give you a view of how many of them are aware of your social media content.
How to track the social media conversation rate?
Step 1: Use a tool like Hootsuite Analytics to pull the number of comments you received during a reporting period.
Step 2: Divide that number by your total number of followers and multiply by 100 to get your conversation rate percentage.
How to calculate the social media conversation rate?
According to Avinash Kaushik, a high conversation rate requires a deeper understanding of your audience, your brand attributes, what you are good at, what value you can add to your followers, and your ecosystem.
This metric is important because we do not measure to manipulate the metrics as digital marketing professionals. We measure to know if we are adding business value, so aim for a higher conversation rate and have meaningful conversations with your audience.
