Facebook — which boasts more than 845 million active users — is the top-used social networking site in 126 out of 137 countries analysed, including the U.S., Australia, Japan, the U.K., Canada, Brazil and India. Europe is the largest continent using Facebook with 232 million users, North America has 222 million and Asia 219 million users. Russia seems to be shunning Facebook in favour of its own homegrown networks, the two most popular  local players being V Kontakte and Odnoklassniki.

Below we can see where social media was for 2011. Interestingly, South America has since adopted Facebook as its primary social network, seeing off competition from Orkut.

Thanks to the variety of social media marketing tools available today, there is a nearly endless stream of data available to marketers. That could make it tough to determine what metrics actually matter for your campaign or brand and why.

Here are nine key performance indicators and explanations for why they might matter to your brand.

1. Share of Voice: The number of mentions of your brand versus competing brands on the social web.

Why You Should Care: Your Share of Voice can be a good indicator of the consumer awareness of your brand as compared to your competitive set. It essentially shows how much of the social conversation your brand has earned or is currently earning.

2. Brand Volume: The total number of brand mentions over a given period of time.

Why You Should Care: If this number isn’t growing, your campaign probably isn’t working. Tracking brand volume week-over-week and month-over-month can be a good way to measure the overall health of your social presence.

3. Engagement: The overall number of times a user talks to your brand on social sites.

Why You Should Care: You can push out all the content in the world, but if no one cares to reply or discuss then what’s the point? Social media is a conversation, after all. The more highly engaged your followers and fans are, the more likely they are to be brand-loyalists, or become influencers and evangelize your products or services on their own personal networks.

4. Interaction Per Post: The number of replies or comments you receive on a given post, tweet, or update.

Why You Should Care: Similar to the engagement metric, the more times a user makes the effort to comment or reply, the more likely it is that they will grow to care about your brand and what you have to say.

5. Sentiment Analysis: The process of determining how the people who talk about your brand on social media actually feel about your brand, products, or company.

Why You Should Care: Although P.T. Barnum famously said, “All publicity is good publicity,” it’s an obvious problem if your brand is consistently being trashed on social media. Also, if the sentiment is mostly neutral, that could be a sign your marketing is not making a big enough impact, and no one cares enough to have a strong opinion either positively or negatively.

6. Social Click-Through Rate: The number of times a user clicks on a link to one of your owned web properties shared via social media.

Why You Should Care: Typically, one of the goals of a social media campaign is to drive traffic to a brand’s website, microsite, or other owned media, thereby creating consumer awareness and subsequently sales or conversions. The growth in the number of clickthroughs can be one of the indicators of a successful, engaging campaign.

7. Key Influencer Mentions: The number of mentions by users you’ve designated as “key influencers” due to their substantial and loyal social media following.

Why You Should Care: Having influencers discuss your brand and serve as a brand ambassador is an extremely powerful way to organically extend your reach within key communities. While having anyone mention your brand on social media can be proof your tactics are working, mentions by key influencers are considered more valuable since they have a deeper reach or more pull/influence with your target demographic or communities.

8. Platform Reach: The number of social platforms that your brand appears on, or the social “reach” across various online networks.

Why You Should Care: Your brand might be a hot topic of discussion on various forums, but your Twitter mentions are low. Whether or not this is a problem depends on the social networks your targets actually use. After all, having a popular Pinterest page, which has a predominantly female user-base, doesn’t really help if your brand is trying to target teenage males.

9. Mobile Mentions: The number of mentions of a brand on mobile social sites.

Why You Should Care: Social media is an increasingly mobile form of communication, and posting updates while on the go is quickly becoming part of nearly everyone’s lifestyle, thanks to smartphones and tablets. If consumers aren’t bringing your brand with them via mobile apps, this could be a sign you are getting left behind. It is especially important if your campaign involves mobile coupons, QR codes, or anything else that’s tied into the Android, iPhone, Blackberry, or Windows phone operating systems.

Even with all these metrics, it is important to remember that there is no magic formula that will simply turn your social media marketing efforts into dollars. The social realm is and always will be a rapidly evolving marketplace of information. What all marketers know is that people want to talk candidly and honestly about their experiences with a brand’s services and products, they want to hear directly from the voices of brands themselves, and that they will use multiple public channels to do so.

Communities

Private online communities are an integral element of social media research. They are a great resource for marketing departments interested in feedback to help with new product development and new communication campaigns. Private online communities can be branded and operated with the DigitalMR active web listening service. Digital MRs mission is to help businesses navigate the ever growing social media world to best understand how their brands are perceived by their customers. This understanding in turn allows organisations to best manage their online reputations as well as improve their services and operational strategies.

Social Media Research seeks to analyse and understand how social media is used in business. It is an integral part of digital market research which is what DigitalMR is all about. The most popular use is marketing and communications, but social media can also be used for customer care, operational improvements, R&D, competitive intelligence,internal and external collaboration.

Active Web Listening

In addition to using traditional online surveys and analytics to find out more about how people/customers use social media DigitalMR uses two groups of Digital Solutions: Active Web Listening and Private Online Communities. Active Web Listening is best described through the following processes: Listen,  Analyse, Understand, Engage. The company listens on the web by harvesting relevant posts for a brand or topic on an ongoing basis. They then analyse the sentiment for a brand, and its competitors and extract actionable business insights for their clients. This then results in a sentiment accuracy that is over 70% in more than 50 languages, this incorporates Net Sentiment Score, a trade-marked score which reflects how positive or negative overall sentiment is for a brand.

Openbusinesscouncil.org recently interviewed Digital MR founder Michalis A Michael. In it he shares his insights on Open Business, the financial industries reaction to Social Media, monitoring tools and how he sees the evolving digital landscape and its implications in business.

Creation

Sysomos, Greek for “everything together”, emerged from an advanced research project started in 2005 at the University of Toronto. The project led to the creation of a core content aggregation and analysis engine released as BlogScope in May 2006.  Toronto based Sysomos was incorporated in September 2007 with the launch of MAP. An updated version of MAP was launched in June 2008.

Business Intelligence

Sysomos brings business intelligence to social media, providing instant and unlimited access to all social media conversations to quickly see what’s happening, why it’s happening, and who’s driving the conversations. Through the use of contextual text analytics and data mining technology, Sysomos collects billions of social media conversations from blogs, Twitter, social networks, messages, boards, wikis and a growing number of major new sources.

Social Media Monitoring

The most important requirements for social media monitoring are as follows:

• Central, comprehensive management of brand, competitor and topic tags
• Restriction according to language and country
• Comprehensive sources: a lot of tools do not scan all the sources and they misappropriate Tweets
• Dashboards with KPIs as well as filter and comparison options (Mentions, Reach, Share of voice, etc.)
• Sentiment analysis, demographic information, identification of influencers and important topics
• Filterable lists of contributions with information on range, user profiles, etc.
• Historic data for retrospective analyses
• Workflows and pragmatic interfaces for the existing CRM system
• Direct interaction options (direct Twitters from the tool)
• E-mail alerts, e.g. for crisis subjects

Sysomos Products

Heartbeat, launched in June 4th 2009, is a cost-effective, real-time social media monitoring and measurement tool. Heartbeat provides constantly updated snapshots of social media conversations delivered using a variety of user-friendly and intuitive graphics. Heartbeat organizes conversations, manage workflow, facilitate collaboration, and provide ways to engage with key influencers. The fact that all the screens can be filtered is of great practical benefit. The filters can be freely connected (example: all Tweets about Levis in English with positive sentiment). The keywords (search queries and filter tags) are defined centrally on a one-off basis. Own Facebook profile pages (administrator rights) can likewise be tracked with Heartbeat.

Sysomos MAP is Sysomos’ flagship product, offering customers the ability to analyze and understand social media conversations. MAP delivers insight and intelligence about the major conversations, why they’re happening and who’s driving them. You can make unlimited queries on any topic to get real-time results, collaborate, and generate detailed reports for clients. MAP is a powerful research tool for agencies which offers the advantages of Radian6. Ad hoc searches and reports can be generated for customers here. Even in Youtube it has proved to be very explorative and powerful.

Facebook Page Central is a professional tool to manage Facebook Fan Pages by implementing auto-moderation and email notifications for new posts and comments, having a dashboard with sentiment analysis and visual reports, workflow management for collaboration with team members and ways to identify top fans and key discussion themes.

Open Business Council conducted an interview with Sysomos founder, Nick Koudas in which he talks about his insights on Social Media, Open Business, how companies are being disrupted by Social Media.

Creation

Radian6 co-founders Chris Newton (@cdnewt) and Chris Ramsey (@chrisramsey)  created the industry-leading social media monitoring platform in 2006,  and by 2011 they were successfully engaging with more than 2500 clients, including over half of the FORTUNE100, and leading global brands like AAA, Dell, GE, Kodak, PepsiCo and UPS.

Alongside their original, invaluable angel investors, Radian6 reached out to Canada’s National Research Council - Industrial Research Assistance Program. This program provides financial support to qualified small and medium-sized enterprises in Canada, by helping them develop technologies for competitive advantage. They also provided, through the program’s ‘startup incubator’, office space and other support. This was one government investment that didn’t fail – by 2010 the company had been turning a profit for two years, and was recognized as the fastest growing player in the social media monitoring space.

Monitoring

Radian6 helps companies listen to what people are saying about them online and engage in those conversations across the social web. From blogs and comments to multimedia, boards, forums and communities like Twitter, Radian6 gathers the discussions happening online and gives businesses the ability to analyze, manage, track, and report on their social media monitoring and engagement efforts.

Analysis widgets, streamlined reporting, integrated workflow capabilities and our Insights platform give users the ability to uncover influencers, track and measure engagement and determine which conversations are having an impact online. Integrated social media, CRM, and web analytics also help companies define their social media ROI.

VP Rob Begg said: ”We are still focused on marketing as a listening-based concept, specific to a particular user. Our point of reference has always been to work with marketers and their needs, and what we see for them is a definite shift happening. Marketing is moving from unsolicited outreach to customers to a more proactive, conversation-based format.”

Salesforce

The Cloud computing giant Salesforce.com acquired social media monitoring company Radian6 for approximately $276 million in cash and $50 million in stock, net of cash in March 2011. Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of Salesforce said:

“With Radian6, salesforce.com is gaining the technology and market leader in social media monitoring. We see this as a huge opportunity. Not only will this acquisition accelerate our growth, it will extend the value of all of our offerings.”

New Features

A  new addition is a social engagement console that allows companies to engage customers directly where a conversation is taking place — such as on Twitter or Facebook — while incorporating third-party data at the same time. New add-ons let users see trending topics from Twitter and statistics from Bit.ly indicating the reach of shared links.

Perhaps most significant of all the changes, said Begg, is the launch of Social Hub, a feature that helps users organize the huge amounts of social media conversations they collect by applying analytics and rules.

“Social Hub was born out of the feedback we received from customers that were particularly successful at social media,” he noted. “They had learned how to manage the huge volume of conversations by treating those 20,000 — or whatever the number would be — posts a day in a way that was automated and scalable. They would apply business rules to classify those posts in certain categories such as service or support.”

Social Hub can also be used for marketing campaigns, helping a company create landing pages or email messages based on a consumer’s likes.

Brian Solis talked about social media with Marcel LeBrun, SVP and GM of Salesforce Radian6.

Interest

With a key age bracket of 25 to 54, Pinterest is really beginning to heat up. In March 2012 the site served 2.3 billion page impressions to over 4 million unique visitors a day, with the top interests being fashion, music, art, memorabilia and wine, Pinterest is still mainly attracting a female audience and is clearly resonating with online consumers in a big way. To put it simply, customers who find a product via Pinterest are more likely to purchase it than those who find the product via other social networks.

Pinterest is a pinboard-style social photo sharing website that allows users to create and manage theme-based image collections such as events, interests, hobbies and more. Users can browse other pinboards for inspiration, ‘re-pin’ images to their own collections and/or ‘like’ photos. Pinterest’s mission is to “connect everyone in the world through the ‘things’ they find interesting” via a global platform of inspiration and idea sharing.

This infographic from Tamba.co.uk breaks down the stats, explaining why Pinterest is so powerful with its consumption-friendly audience and goes into detail, revealing who the key audience is and what their interests are.

Career Network

BranchOut.com is the largest professional networking service on the Facebook platform. The service taps into users social graphs and networks to help them find jobs, sales leads and recruit new members of staff. The company has over 400 million professional profiles through 10 million active users. The company was founded in July 2010 by Rick Marini, he says this about the rapid growth of BranchOut:

“One of the reasons why BranchOut grew so quickly is because we have superconnectors with very big networks. For example, Michael Arrington, the founder and Editor of TechCrunch, is connected to over over 800,000 people at 2.4 million companies on BranchOut. When these superconnectors joined BranchOut, a lot of people followed. We grew quickly in the U.S. and Europe and also have a presence in Asia and Latin America.”

Different Method

BranchOut allows users to see which of their Facebook friends (or friends of friends) work at specific companies. Unlike LinkedIn, it doesn’t require users to build a professional network one person at a time. Rather, they simply connect to their pre-existing Facebook graphs. The interface works a lot like LinkedIn from there: users can fill in their work histories, send messages to their connections, collect endorsements and request introductions to friends of friends.

Growth

At the start of 2012 BranchOut had just 1 million monthly active users. Then the professional networking app hired a dedicated growth team, launched a mobile web app, and hit the network effect tipping point. According to AppData, by February it had 2.7 million MAU. Now the Facebook based BranchOut is really starting to gaim momentum, tapping into the employment needs of people past the 10 million registration mark to reach 5.5 million MAU, half from overseas.

“At this point, it’s Coke and Pepsi,” Rick Marini says of the company’s relationship with LinkedIn. “We know the best way to maintain our leadership position is to continue to provide the best experience for our users. We are constantly focused on refining our current features and building new products.”

The way things are going, it might not be long before BranchOut becomes the new Coke.

Record Breaker

Additionally, the Millennial Media IPO was pushed up to early April because Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, which were underwriting both offerings, wanted to “make room” for Facebook. Mobile strategy issues and issues around privacy are of the most concern for institutional investors, and some of the former were pleased by the Instagram buy. Facebook’s IPO will be the biggest of any tech company in history. Google last held the record in 2004 at an impressive  $1.67billion.

The Shareholders

There are several people who will be cashing in on this announcement:

• Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg
• Co-founder Dustin Moskovitz
• Co-founder Eduardo Saverin
• Co-founder Chris Hughes
• Sean Parker, Napster co-founder and Facebook partial owner

Zuckerberg owns 24% of the company,  so will make an estimated $25 billion. It looks like Facebook got to this stage by increasing revenue from advertising, Facebook fan pages and display ads.

Letter from Mark Zuckerberg

Zuckerberg included a letter into the company’s filing for the IPO, where he explains the reason he created what is now the world’s largest social networking site in 2004 . The letter provides rare insight into Zuckerberg, who still remains somewhat of an enigma despite the worldwide presence of Facebook.

In it he says:

“Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected. We think it’s important that everyone who invests in Facebook understands what this mission means to us, how we make decisions and why we do the things we do. I will try to outline our approach in this letter.

At Facebook, we’re inspired by technologies that have revolutionized how people spread and consume information. We often talk about inventions like the printing press and the television — by simply making communication more efficient, they led to a complete transformation of many important parts of society. They gave more people a voice. They encouraged progress. They changed the way society was organized. They brought us closer together.”

 

This infographic created by accountingdegreeonline.net  shows how the evaluation breaks down:

From the US Navy Seals raid on Osama Bin Laden’s compound to Whitney Houston’s death, most people will have become aware of these events by seeing peoples reactions and posts on Twitter or Facebook, not by reading it in the morning paper.

However, there are pitfalls to getting your news updates straight from the social media universe,  50% of news consumers have received “breaking news” via social media, only to find out later it was false information or a hoax.

The online portal www.schools.com put together the below infographic to demonstrate the changing relationship between newspapers, social media and breaking news stories.

Recently I spoke to one of the Yandex department heads. When asked about the social media and digital landscape in the Russian market they replied -

“Russian companies need to get educated and there is a need to point out that they need social media and digital strategy. There are a number of agencies on the market offering a similar range of services quite expensively priced and the results of their work leaves a lot to be desired. However, there are many young and resourceful people, usually students, who are willing to perform the same type of work virtually for nothing just to gain experience and knowledge. ”

Such a statement suggests that in the future, digital and social media space in Russia will grow at a rapid pace, and will be created with the support of young but experienced professionals.

Big Potential?

There are 3 main reasons why Russia is catching up with other countries in the social media industry.

1. Firstly, there is the presence of large international corporations in the Russian market, they are at the heart of industry and would be the main engine and pioneers of social media. These corporations use it to maximize profits, increase brand awareness, identify the strengths/weaknesses of advertising campaigns and to maintain communications with the consumer, including their involvement in co-creation.
2. Secondly, the social platforms mentioned earlier do not lag behind the West, they create more and more innovations with their own approach involving users from different communities, groups, contests, promotions, and of course big and small businesses participate. Additionally, big and small businesses collaborate with the social platforms to help them run their campaigns, with social media providing the “space”.
3. Thirdly, small businesses take the lion’s share in Russia, and the market economy is impossible without  entrepreneurial spirit and competition. This factor is forcing businesses to apply new approaches and concepts, as the main objective for the entrepreneur here would be to ensure healthy business growth is acquired as soon as possible to secure the ROI into its further development.

For modern companies in Russia, social media will be the door into the world of open innovation and the main tool for raising brand awareness.

Social Media Event

There has been a lot of talk about the “rainbow” future of the Russian mobile communications sector. It was concluded that providing regions with cheap mobile communications could be relatively easy and also non-expensive. This month there was one of the largest social and mobile communications conferences in Russia. Through this event I was able to get a better understanding of how the social media market in Russia is structured, which tools leading market experts use and how they predict the future market trends. Some data and statistics from previous years, as well as conclusions and actions taken were presented.

The question of user “matureness” was also raised – the answer was not straightforward, but it certainly revealed a positive trend.

In the master class sessions, monitoring and reputation management concepts were discussed, which shows that Russia is on the right  path for development and understands its direction.

Brighter Future

In Russia there is an increase in activities conducted around the social media and digital landscape concepts. There are many young entrepreneurs emerging who see the potential of this market sector and want to work in it (there were an incredible number of interesting questions from the audience, reflecting their interest and thirst for knowledge).

To conclude, I think there are many smart and resourceful people in Russia today, and if the assumptions shown above are fulfilled, they will help to develop this sphere very quickly and bring in a lot of interesting and innovative ideas and concepts.