It’s hard to believe that social media has been around for over ten years now. Over this time many platforms of home come and gone and others have undergone many versions and updates. If there is one thing that has remained relatively consistent, it has been the question as how to effectively value social. Beyond simply determining how to tie value to posts, another major question that needs to be answered is how do you then turn these valuations into actual dollars and revenue.
Certainly there are many different ways to do this – let me share how I’ve approached the problem.
At Monumental we use a couple of different tools to help us with our social data.
Blinkfire Analytics (https://www.blinkfire.com/landing): Blinkfire tracks logo/graphic placement and provides an approximated value in respect to social media posts. The tool tracks all brand mentions, tags, and logo/graphic placements in social media posts, photos, and videos to estimate the value of that post for a brand. To get that value, they compare the visual or tag with the impressions from the post (retweets, likes, etc.) to give an estimated value that brand received from social media posts over a certain span of time. It can break the reports down by social media outlet, type of social media, and brand.
TrackMaven (https://trackmaven.com/): TrackMaven is a marketing analytics and attribution software. Simply put, it’s a powerful social listening tool that allows individuals to track, benchmark, and improve their digital footprint through actionable insights. These actionable insights help the digital marketing identify engaging topics and tactics and benchmark content performance.
Between these two tools, we have a lot of data on each individual post we put out as an organization. The major different when it comes to data between the two is that Blinkfire is able to provide accurate valuation data, while TrackMaven is able to get more granular with detailed post metrics.
Step 1 – Marry the Datasets
It’s great to have valuation data and it’s great to have granular post data, but unless you can marry the two together, each are limited in the amount of value and impact they can provide. This was our first step, and once we had the two data sets united, we had a deeper understanding of what type of value we were generating as an organization in a variety of different ways. No longer were we limited by valuations per each post, but were now all of a sudden able to calculate valuations based on the day of week or time of day across each social channel (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.) and media type (text, image, video).
Now the blinders were off. We could pivot on any metric and have a valuation associated with it. The partnership team was ecstatic, then it happened, they asked a question about how to use the data to make more money.
Step 2 – Determine How and What you Sell
How do you sell social assets? Do you sell posts individually or by series or by both? Knowing how and what you sell is going to be key in how you set up your data in the next step…
Step 3 – Identify the Low-Hanging Fruit
You know what you’re selling and you have the valuations to go with it. It’s now time to expose and identify the opportunities for your partnership team. One way I approached this was by creating a list of all available sellable content and sorted this in descending order to create a list, in order, of highest to lowest valuable sellable content. From here I applied an additional filter to separate already sold content. Viola, a list of the lowest hanging, most valuable content was ready.
Step 4 – Continuously Re-evaluate and Test your Assumptions
The fun doesn’t stop at producing data and delivering it to your sales teams. It is vitally important you continue to update the variables in your valuation and monitor how engagement with your different types of posts changes over time.
This method as it relates to our business operations has started to have major impacts throughout our organization with a number of different departs. Our marketing team has deeper insights into their content, and our partnership division has become empowered to have more engaging and knowledgeable conversations with their clients at every stage in the sales cycle. This information is being leveraged from pitches to end of the year recaps and every step in between.
-Alex