What’s important – Your Facebook fan base or engagement? Your Twitter followers or number of Retweets?
Social media gurus have hyped up the numbers ensuring that brands get into the number trap and in the process, spend $$s without getting any real benefit.
Time and again, people have asked whether there a RoI in social media or not? But before we answer that question, an important aspect to understand is whether there is a way to benchmark one’s social media activities against competition/industry? Unless you benchmark, you cannot measure and hence, cannot calculate RoI.
For example, it’s very difficult to answer whether growing Facebook fanbase by 20% every month is a good data point or not? A lot depends on your industry category and frankly, whether your current fanbase is engaged enough or not!
Most brands are flying blind on social media. The absence of relative benchmarks so far has proved a detriment to big brands who are used to competitive benchmarking and intelligence on other media.
Unmetric, the social media benchmarking company (Chennai based startup) aims to solve this dilemma with its newly launched tool (currently in private beta).
Besides comparing the performance of competing brands, Unmetric also benchmarks brands against their sector so they know if they are “on par”. The web application captures everything that matters, including fan and follower growth, fan profiles, response times, timing and insights into content strategies – and offers actionable insights.
Having said that, currently UnMetric is limited to brands they are monitoring and if you want to get your brand added, you need to request for the same.
Check out some of the comparison I did using UnMetric in the last few hours.
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Telecom Operators : How Active Are They In Social Media
I compared Airtel, Aircel, Tata DoCoMo, Virgin Mobile and Vodafone and here is the result:
Tata DoCoMo has the highest fanbase – but does that translate into engagement?
Airtel rules when it comes to engagement and interesting that a lot of posts (on Facebook wall) happens from Airtel fans (vs. page admin), as opposed to other brands.
But are these compaints about Airtel’s QoS (Quality of Service)? Well, take a look at sentimental analysis of the brands.
That is, Airtel India also leads the negative sentiment race, though Virgin Mobile India (which seems silent in its social media activities) leads the positive sentiments among other operators.
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Enfield Vs. Bajaj
So you expected Enfield fans to be super active in social media? Check this.
UnMetric essentially brings a set of context to data and is a great tool to measure one’s social media efforts (in comparison with competitors/industry). Right now, you can track 5 brands and the team sends out alerts if there are unusual activities happening in a brand page (for example, if there is an increased engagement/FB likes/comments etc).
However, social media is just not limited to Facebook/Twitter (what about blogs?), but eventually find a way in these channels (all blogs do have a presence on Twitter/FB). Unmetric doesn’t analyzes blogs owing to its target segment. That is, UnMetric team is focused more on helping a marketer understand the RoI (of their social media efforts)/benchmarking and less on brand’s analytics.
And that’s where lies the difference with several other SMM analytical tools present in the market (Buzzgain was one of such tools and was acquired by US based Meltwater).
Overall, UnMetric is a damn interesting startup to watch out for – they are solving a real need in the market, though the challenge lies in selling the service to US customers and creating brand awareness. Having said that, the least that they can do is to publish market reports and tie up with mainstream media companies for supplying them these brand analytics.
What’s your opinion? Tomorrow, we will share an interview with the team and their past experience (hint:UnPluggd).
