The heart of every social media program is determining whether you have made a difference in achieving the strategic objectives of your communications plan and influencing the intended audience. More so than many other tactics we might use in communications, social media allows us the opportunity to measure and understand the impact of both the issues we are researching and our outbound campaigns.

1. © Heather Read Page 1 of 4
Social Media Management
@heatherread
Social Media Analysis: Assessing your audience
04/20/2012
Adapted from article originally published at PRSA Philadelphia
by Heather Read
The heart of every social media program is determining whether you have made a difference in
achieving the strategic objectives of your communications plan and influencing the intended audience.
More so than many other tactics we might use in communications, social media allows us the
opportunity to measure and understand the impact of both the issues we are researching and our
outbound campaigns.
Volume
The easiest and most straightforward way to understand the importance of a topic is to know how many
people are talking about it, or in the world of social media, commenting about it. We call this post
volume. This is typically something you will measure by time period (month, week, day, or hour) or by
content source.
In the image below, I’ve provided an example of what post volume looks like for the last 30 days on the
topic “PRSA Philadelphia” using the keywords (“PRSA Philadelphia” AND prsaphilly AND “PRSA Philly”).
In the upper left image, you can see that in the last 30 days there were 222 posts about this topic (they
all happen to be on Twitter in this case). However if you look at the bottom right image, which sorts this
number by the unique source count, you will see that there are 90 unique authors. That’s an average of
2.46 posts per user.
To determine who is posting the most, you would either use a report from your monitoring tool that
gives you the most prolific authors, or you can export your post list and use an Excel feature like pivot
charts to sort the posts by number of posts per person. Be careful if you are dealing with a large number
of posts (>5000) though, because social networks like Twitter do not let you export large chunks of data
into external databases; you will need to have a monitoring tool that has a relationship with these social
networks to do the analysis for you.

2. © Heather Read Page 2 of 4
Social Media Management
@heatherread
Twitter impressions
Similar to how we measure impression totals based on publication circulation data, Twitter impressions
offer a way to understand how the topic is reaching individual users. In most cases, when you are using
a monitoring tool, it will allow you to sort your result by number of Twitter followers. You can see in the
image below that while we had 222 posts this month for “PRSA Philadelphia,” this monitoring tool is
telling us that these posts have reached more than 281,000 Twitter users. This represents the total
possible Twitter users we could have reached.

3. © Heather Read Page 3 of 4
Social Media Management
@heatherread
This number is usually calculated by totaling the number of followers on each of the accounts posted. As
a result, there are two important caveats. First, take care to de-duplicate Twitter followers if you have a
low number of unique authors. If you do not, you are unnecessarily recounting the Twitter followers of
the same users. Second, if you are measuring your outbound campaigns, please be careful to consider
how you are measuring performance on your outbound campaigns vs. this conversation you are
monitoring to get the full reach of the Twitter audience.
Facebook shares and views
Also in the last column, we discussed a number of Facebook metrics. All of these are pertinent to
understanding and analyzing the audience of the Facebook page you manage. What can be specifically
useful here is to estimate the reach of your page using friends of fans and estimating what percentage
of your page is actually engaging with you by dividing your page fans by the talking about this count. You
can also estimate the total reach of an individual piece of content outside of your page by the number of
shares it has.
Facebook also offers interesting demographic information. You can purchase behavior or market insight
reports to see patterns and understand if your Facebook audience has a different brand affinity than
your purchasers.
Blogs
The first way you can tell if a blog is influential is by looking for the number of inbound links, unique
monthly visitors or its overall Alexa score (here is an old but useful post about Alexa scores). Some
monitoring tools embed data-like inbound links-to help you quickly get to this number, or you can look
up this information by searching the blog’s URL on Alexa.com.
Keep in mind that the vast majority of blogs will not be in the Alexa Top 100,000, especially if they are
highly targeted to a specific subject matter. There are some other metrics you can use to dig a little
deeper.
Look at the blog author’s social footprint – if their Twitter and Facebook pages have a lot of fans,
chances are the author’s content is getting read there too.
Look at the number of comments on the page. If the post has no comments, either the community that
reads the blog doesn’t resonate with the topic, or perhaps the blog has lost readers.
Check Google rank. Sometimes a small blog will start talking about a topic, and as public interest builds,
it attracts readers because of its keyword rank.
Here are a few other useful blog research tools to help you find and determine influence of blogs:
http://technorati.com/blogs/top100/, http://www.blogarama.com/ and http://www.bloglines.com/.

4. © Heather Read Page 4 of 4
Social Media Management
@heatherread
Influencer Scores
In recent years, a number of social influence scoring services have emerged to help calculate the
supposed influence of users whether across all social media, within their specific network, or for
particular topics. The most well-known are Klout and Peerindex. Both of these services can provide good
directional information for you to understand the relative influence of a particular user, but you should
exercise caution in using them as your only audience measurement. Issues or crisis topics can start out
with small bloggers or social media users of low influence and spread quickly. You should always try to
escalate items early and not discount them simply because of a low influencer score.
You should know that Klout integrates with some monitoring tools, directly saving you an extra research
step, and both Klout and PeerIndex offer browser plugins that will display their scores natively in
Twitter. Recently, Pinpuff.com launched to help track the influence of Pinterest users. Both Klout and
Pinpuff allow you to use their relative influence scores to run dedicated marketing promotions to
influential users.
*Please note images above produced by Radian6