Tracking the value of social conversations through share of influence

Knowing the value — not just volume — of conversations about your brand across social media is a critical metric to track

This is particularly important when evaluating how creators are talking about your brand. Creators are the ultimate barometer of consumer interest. Sure you’re following the conversations from the creators you work with directly. But what about other creators also talking about you?

Monitoring, and measuring, the impact of creator conversations presents a powerful, concentrated panel of tastemakers across the social sphere. Quantifying the level of influence, reach, and impact that creators bring — both organically and through paid partnerships — is critical.

That’s why we’ve developed and expanded our share of influence reporting. SOI, as measured by the “earned media value” (EMV) that creator content accumulates, quantifies the estimated value of consumer engagement with digital earned media. This measurement can be used to evaluate the earned performance of individual marketing campaigns and benchmark brands within the competitive landscape.

Measuring social influence

Based on content from hundreds of thousands of the most influential content creators across the world, EMV reveals brands that are not just capturing consumer interest, but poised for significant growth.

This measurement is helpful for brands looking to benchmark their creator marketing efforts, both against their historical results, and against that of competitors within an industry vertical.

We’ve found that SOI is highly correlated with brand lift, desirability, and other important metrics that justify creator marketing investment. This is how brands make both creative and budgetary decisions and plan and execute strategy and tactics.

Perhaps most importantly, SOI is how you can best optimize both content and creator partnerships on the fly to maximize results in real time as conversations take place across social channels.

Industry benchmarking

Let’s take a look at this measurement in practice. We recently released a report identifying the food and beverage brands with the largest SOI in the first half of this year.

We found that overall, more than 437,000 creators actively discussed food and beverage brands during the period measured, generating more than 1.2 million posts. This content garnered a remarkable 75.4 billion impressions, and 3 billion engagements, resulting in $4.8bn in earned media value.

The top five brands, which combined accounted for 15.3% of the industry’s overall share of influence, included McDonald’s, Starbucks, Red Bull, Celsius, and Oreo. But what gets interesting is how they achieved their SOI.

Third-ranked Red Bull, for instance, worked with a quarter of the creators that second-place Starbucks did. Yet those creators on average posted more than twice as much as Starbucks’ creators. As a result, while Red Bull’s overall Share of Influence ranking was slightly behind that of Starbucks, its average EMV per creator was three times that of the coffee giant.

By identifying which creators are organically passionate about your products and understanding which creators have the greatest likelihood to drive value, you can use SOI data to identify the creators posting about your brand organically to recruit into paid partnerships. What’s more, you can use the same to determine which creator partners are worth investing in further, which types of posts are delivering the greatest results, and even which platforms work best with which creators.

Measurement statistics criteria

That’s because SOI has all three criteria needed for any measurement statistic to be meaningful: predictive, comparable, and actionable.

Predictive: A score that can forecast future brand outcomes including change in revenue, share of market, stock prices, or ticket sales. This must be correlated to standard measures of brand lift and brand desirability and to changes in other metrics such as Google searches.

Comparable: A comparative score can be used to rank and compare brands within a vertical over time to better understand relative performance. Benchmarking.

Actionable: An actionable score can be used to guide creator marketing investment decisions.

Developing and tracking these metrics can help social-first direct-to-consumer brands, agencies, and the world's leading global brands better understand and take action upon the enormous impact that creators are having on their business performance.

To be sure, social media activity in general, and that of creators in particular, can be easily measured. Likes. Followers. Shares. Comments. All this activity creates metrics that are easily tracked, aggregated, and reported.

What’s less tracked or measured is a metric that defines what all this activity actually means. It’s one thing to measure the activity around a conversation. It’s quite another to measure the value of a conversation.

The need for this measurement is more critical than ever, with creator content now moving hundreds of billions of dollars of market capitalization for the companies embracing the strategy. With this much at stake, brands need to learn to better nurture their most powerful voices and take measurable action to be the next billion-dollar brand built through the creator channel.

That's where you find exponential impact. Scalable impact. And, of course, value.