How to make media monitoring an effective and useful tool for business development? The most important thing is to determine the metrics by which you will measure the performance and reputation of your brand in the media and social networks. Working on certain metrics, you will be able to establish both planning and evaluation of your employees.
We at Semantrum have prepared this article for you, gathering 8 years of experience and the most successful cases of our clients: banks, industrial enterprises, government agencies, pharmaceutical companies, PR agencies, etc.
In the Semantrum system, all these metrics are tracked automatically, you can start implementing these metrics today, using the information you already have.
Check yourself, how many of these metrics do you track?
Quantitative evaluation of communication
Quantitative indicators are the easiest to track, at the same time they give a good understanding of the brand/organization's presence in the media and social networks. The most important thing to properly quantify communication is to properly set up monitoring of mentions of your brand or organization, to consider all the necessary keywords and communication channels.
Brand awareness (or brand effectiveness, Brand performance). The number of mentions about you in the dynamics over time. By the number of mentions of the company/brand over a certain period and in dynamics, you can assess how well known your brand is in the media and "on the ear" in social networks.
Audience awareness about the brand. Audience coverage (forecasted number of contacts) in the media and social networks. The Semantrum system calculates the audience reach for publications in the media and social networks even in cases when the social network itself does not provide data on the number of views of posts.
? Why should you use these two indicators separately and how do they differ? The fact is that awareness about you depends not only on the number of publications/posts, but also on the popularity of the sources on which they are published. Therefore, we advise you to always pay attention to both the number of publications and their coverage, as well as compare these indicators with each other.
Recognition of speakers/representatives. The number of mentions of speakers/representatives of the company and the forecasted number of contacts with the audience for such publications. By evaluating the number and coverage of publications, you can understand how well your speakers/representatives are known in the media. To facilitate the work in tagging publications with speakers, Semantrum offers to use the automatic keyword tagging function.
Areas of brand awareness. The number of mentions and the forecasted number of contacts by publication topics. Does your company not only provide services, but is also a great employer and socially responsible business? In many cases, the information field can be divided into thematic areas. Analyze how recognizable your company is in different thematic areas of its activities. Thanks to the automatic keyword tagging function in Semantrum, you can set up the distribution of the entire publication array into the thematic zones you define
Channels of communication. The number of mentions and the forecasted number of contacts by type of media and social networks. Analyze whether your brand is evenly represented in different types of media and social networks.
Qualitative evaluation of communication
Qualitative brand performance metrics include those that have traditionally been considered more difficult to track, as they often require manual evaluation of posts. But progress has been made, and now many qualitative characteristics of publications can be tracked automatically. Therefore, even if you have limited resources (budget or time to manually process mentions), you should not compromise on the quality of your communication assessment.
Trust in brand. Percentage of publications, positive by tone of voice, in the total number of publications about your brand/organization.
Media favorability index. The ratio of the number of positive publications to the number of negative mentions, has a value from -10 to 10. A negative value of the Index shows that positive publications do not compensate for negative ones. The index gives an understanding of what emotions prevail in your information field and how significant they are. In Semantrum, the Index is calculated automatically, you can receive data about it from automatic reports in .docx format.
Determining the role in publications. Percentage of publications in which your brand/organization is in the main role (in focus, the text is devoted only to you or mainly to you) of the total number of publications. The number of publications in the lead role will show how interesting you are to the media. The Semantrum system automatically determines the focus (role in the publication) in each topic of your account, and you can also use a filter by this indicator.
Media Visibility Index. The sum of the visibility indices of all publications about your brand/organization for a single publication is calculated through coefficients by role in the publication, type of media and weight of the source (its traffic and importance). It shows how prominent mentions of you are in the information field. This tool helps to evaluate the effectiveness of your PR and media relations. In the Semantrum system, the Media Visibility Index is calculated for each publication automatically, and you can use this indicator as a filter to get the publications that have the greatest impact on your reputation.
Analysis of competitors/players in the information field
Analysis of communication in terms of comparison with competitors will give you the answer to the question of how to evaluate your own quantitative and qualitative indicators - as the market average, below or above the average. After all, any measurements are most important not by themselves, but in comparison. Using the results of this analysis, you will be able to formulate goals for the following periods and track your achievements much easier.
Share of voice. Percentage of publications about your brand/organization and their coverage of the total number of publications and their coverage about all your competitors/players in the information field. This metric reflects how visible you are among all players in the market, what place your brand occupies among competitors.
Benchmarks. Choose the metrics that are important to you compared to competitors or other players in the information field and track them. You will be able to evaluate how satisfied you are with the current level of your metrics by comparing it with the competitors' metrics, as well as observe its dynamics over time. The Semantrum system has options for comparing with competitors, for example, comparing topics in the "Graphs" mode and a special automatic report for comparing topics. In the interactive dashboard, you will also find many opportunities to compare your indicators with those of competitors, as well as an integrated visualization of competitors' indicators by the Media Loyalty Index, the number of publications and audience coverage, which will allow you to assess the quantity and quality of communication of market players immediately.
All these different metrics should be tracked and monitored on an ongoing basis. Thus, you can make a snapshot of the metrics that are important to you before the start of the communication campaign and after its completion, and assess whether you have achieved your goal.
You can also cross metrics with other parameters to get even more effective results in media analytics. For example, you can consider the Loyalty Index separately in media and social networks, compare its level in large and small sources, in media of different topics and different countries, etc. Individual sources of mentions can also be viewed through the prism of the tone of voice indicator. This way you can find brand advocates in the media and social networks, or, on the contrary, problematic sources that (deliberately or spontaneously) spread negative information about you.
So far, we hope that most of the metrics were familiar to you and are used in your company. And if you found something new for yourself in this list - we are happy to be useful for you! However, you can get the most benefit from using the Semantrum system, because you can track all the above metrics in it. The main principle of our work is to provide the best possible result for you.