Liveworld
Grade your Facebook Page with our Social Scorecard
Now that marketers everywhere have hopped on the social media marketing bandwagon, the next big wave of discussions and advancement across the industry will focus on measurement, analytics, and insight.
Call Phase One officially over; the paradigm shift has occurred. No one is asking “should I be doing social media marketing?” anymore. The big question in social media now is “How do I know how I’m doing?”
Enter the Social Scorecard.
The Social Scorecard is a simple evaluation tool that we use when working with clients to rank how well a brand is using social marketing as a whole, or within a particular channel. Our complete LiveWorld Social Scorecard contains 25 questions, but I’ve condensed those down to the most critical 12 for this post, and with a specific focus on Facebook Pages.
To find out how your brand is faring with Facebook marketing, and where your efforts could use improvement, score yourself on the questions below.
We’ve also embedded our Social Scorecard as a shareable/downloadable/printable document from our Slideshare account below, so you can keep and use it for reference!
Engagement
Rank your Facebook Page on a scale of 1-5 points for each question, with 5 being the best.
1. Does your brand publish fresh Wall content on a consistent basis? Your actual milage may vary, but as a general guideline, we recommend that brands publish 5-10 status updates per week to stay relevant in their fans’ News Feeds. (Because of Facebook’s EdgeRank formula, posting too infrequently could largely render your brand’s Facebook presence invisible!)
2. Is the topic ratio appropriate? A brand should generally spend only 20% of its posts talking about its own products, services, and promotions; 30-40% of the time talking about industry-related topics of interest for their customers; and the rest of the time engaging in a purely social manner. Or to put it another way, how interesting is someone at a party who only talks about themselves or their work all the time?
3. How engaged are your fans by the content? Add up the number of likes and comments per post, and then divide that sum by the number of impressions for that post (Likes + Comments / Total Impressions). If the result is 1% or greater, you’re doing very well! On the Facebook Wall, most brand posts generate a 0.3-0.5% “Feedback” percentage.)
4. Does the content mix include a variety of media: text, photos, video, slides, apps, games, and special offers? Your fans like different types of media. Some of them like to read, some like to look at pictures, and some like to share videos or play games. As with putting food out at a party, make sure you have at least a little something to satisfy everyone’s tastes. Marketing bonus: rich media tends to rank well in the Facebook EdgeRank algorithm, too.
5. What is the overall quality of fan engagement? Are people most using your Page to complain about the brand? Are they asking random questions or just posting spam, chain letters, or other nonsense? Or are they saying good things about their experience with your product and responding “on topic” to the content you are posting?
Tone & Culture
Rank your Facebook Page on a scale of 1-4 points for each question, with 4 being the best.
1. Are there published participation moderation guidelines that clearly define acceptable and prohibited behaviors on the Page? Your fans won’t know how they are supposed to behave unless you tell them. Is swearing allowed? Outside links? Can a fan post anything and everything, or are there restrictions?
2. How appropriately are conflicts and problems addressed? When your fans raise complaints or customer-service issues, how well does the brand respond? Do you jump into discussions where warranted, and in a reasonable amount of time? And are those responses bland and corporate, or specific and caring?
3. Does the tone of the Page reflect positively on the brand? If your Facebook Page and posts were a party, is it the kind of party you actually want? Were you hoping for a fun picnic that turned out to be a drunken kegger? Is it a cocktail party that devolved into a series of arguments and boorish behavior? Or is everyone having a good time — fans and brand included?
3. Does your brand have a persistent and engaging presence? If your brand were a person, would others want to introduce you at a party based on what you’re posting on Facebook and how you’re interacting and responding to your fans?
Marketing Integration
Rank your Facebook Page on a scale of 1-3 points for each question, with 3 being the best.
1. Is there shareable content? You want your fans and customers to spread the word about the good work you do and how cool your brand is, right? Then give them something in the way of helpful, informative, or entertaining content to pass along to their friends, and in a way that will make them proud to have gotten it from you!
2. Are you integrating elements of your corporate site into your Facebook Page? Does your brand’s main site include features such as a store locator, customer-support page or module, or online store? If so, how well are you porting or replicating that functionality over to Facebook?
3. Are you extending your Facebook Page’s presence back to your corporate site, with the “Like” button and other Facebook social plugins. When your fans and customers “Like” the content or product pages on your dot-com site, the Facebook Open Graph enables you to reach and target them back on Facebook. Are you taking advantage of this marketing opportunity?
Your Scorecard Results
Beginner: 11-20. You’re probably new to social media marketing, but at least you’re in the game! Pick one area to focus and improve on. We suggest spending time defining your brand’s social Tone & Culture as a starting point.
Advanced Beginner: 21-30. Surprisingly, many big “name” brands score in this range. You’re doing a few things well, but likely aren’t generating enough Engagement around your posts to fully reap the benefits of Facebook marketing. To raise your score, work on posting about topics that your fans really care about and that motivate them to respond!
Intermediate: 31-40. Most Pages in this range are scoring well in two of the main categories, but need improvement in the third. Typically, your brand hasn’t hit the sweet spot with Engagement, or doesn’t have the staffing time/resources to carry out full Marketing Integration. In either scenario, it should be obvious what your team needs to focus on next.
Expert: 41-49. Being called a “social media expert” can sometimes cause a backlash, but if your brand’s Page is scoring this highly, you probably deserve the title! Your Page is performing well in all three key areas of Facebook marketing, and with just a few tweaks, you can reach 50!
The LiveWorld Social Scorecard Methodology
We believe that there are three main components to using “Social” successfully:
- Engagement, accounting for 50% of the total score
- Tone & Culture, ~ 30% of the total score
- Marketing Integration, ~ 20% of the total score
At LiveWorld, we maintain that engaging with your customers is the most visible reflection of your social marketing efforts. If you engage successfully, you can make up for a lot of stumbling around inside your company with partially-defined strategies and unclear goals, as long as you have good intentions and strong interactions with your fans.
Successful engagement, however, requires some deep thinking about your company culture prior to engagement, and clear strategies and definition of how you are going to interact with your fans and customers in social venues. That’s the Tone & Culture part that we’re talking about.
And since social marketing is often viewed as a standalone media buy for brands –– like print advertising or television — we also take a look at how well a company is integrating all of its other marketing initiatives and “socializing” those efforts. We believe in “recycling,” too! If you’ve already spent dollars creating other marketing collateral, you may as well repurpose that content for social purposes, where it may take on a second life of its own and even outperform the original campaign!
Our Social Scorecard uses somewhat subjective measurements. On our full 100-point scale, it’s not really important whether you score, say, a 68 or a 64. Two different people looking at the same site or Facebook Page are bound to have slightly different views of what they see.
What matters most is not your absolute score, but where you rank in the grand scheme of things. Is your brand scoring in the 40-60 range? The 70s or the 80s? Maybe your program is clicking on all cylinders and you’re scoring in the 90s? Work your way through the Social Scorecard, and you’ll have a good barometer on where your marketing efforts stand.
This post is part of an ongoing “31 Days of Facebook Marketing” series from LiveWorld.