Editor’s note: Senior Customer Success Maven Anna Celentino explains how you can use TrackMaven’s impact score to report marketing successes, and learn from your failures.
According to my Fitbit, yesterday I walked about 8,500 steps. I’m at work nine to 10 hours a day and still managed to get 8,500 steps in, so that seems pretty great! Small victories. But, then I looked at my average step count over the last two weeks; I had actually been averaging about 10,250 steps. Instead of celebrating my 8,500 steps, I started asking myself why I had performed below my average. As I paced around the room trying to increase my step count, I realized that while individual data points are valuable, they don’t mean anything without context.
This same logic that drives my Fitbit behavior is also true for marketing content. While getting a large number of likes on a blog or Facebook post might seem great, you can’t celebrate without knowing how an individual post performed relative to everything else you — or other brands you are monitoring — have created.
When we’re looking for that context in TrackMaven — that ability to see how content performed relative to the other content that’s been published — we use the TrackMaven Impact Score.
How do we measure impact?
TrackMaven’s Impact Score measures the average number of interactions with your brand’s posts from the previous 30 days and benchmarks against it. For example, if you published a post on June 30, TrackMaven looks over content from the previous 30 days. Let’s say that in those previous 30 days, you had an average of 50 interactions per post. So that post on June 30 that got 100 interactions would have an Impact Score of “2X” meaning that this post performed two times better than your recent average of 50.
One of the best parts of our Impact Score is that it’s not a fixed number, but evolves as you continue to grow your audience and increase engagement with your brand on social.
Let’s take a look at Whole Foods’ Instagram content so far this year. Both of the posts below have an Impact Score of “1X.” This content is completely average for Whole Foods. But when we look at the actual interaction numbers we see something dramatically different. The post on the left was published in February and has 5,082 interactions, but the post on the right was published in May and has 10,856 interactions.
So what does this mean? It means that in May, Whole Foods’ Instagram content was performing on average much more strongly than what they were publishing in February. They had effectively raised the bar on what counts as average content. I think we can all agree that having your average be over 10,000 interactions is better than having it be around 5,000!
Here are three ways you can use TrackMaven’s Impact Score to evaluate your content:
Evaluate the effectiveness of your content over time
The Whole Foods example is an exercise you should also be doing on a regular basis. Using TrackMaven’s Content Feed and Content Feed Export look at your impact scores across a given period of time. What is your average Impact Score? What did 2X content look like a month ago versus today? How about a year ago? Is our average increasing like we saw in Whole Foods’ February content versus their May Instagram content?
Find out what doesn’t work for your brand on social
We’ve been talking a lot about the highest impact content, but it’s also an important exercise to look at your least impactful content. In TrackMaven, instead of sorting by highest impact, sort by lowest impact and then analyze! What topics seemed to fall flat? Are there any images, captions or links that didn’t resonate? For Whole Foods, it looks like an April Fool’s joke that didn’t perform well was their least impactful post so far this year:
Just a cursory review of their 10 lowest performing posts, seem to suggest that Instagram posts that featured Whole Foods’ beauty products or humans — meaning, almost anything that’s not food — tended to perform poorly relative to everything else they’ve published on Instagram.
As a barometer for topics that are performing well
The Impact Score can also be used as a barometer of how content on a specific topic is performing! As I dove into Whole Foods’ Instagram content, I happened to notice that many of their most impactful posts this year featured avocado. Curious, I used TrackMaven’s search feature to see just how frequently avocado appeared in their Instagram content. So far in 2016, there are 63 Instagram posts from Whole Foods that mention avocado. Of those 63 total posts, 13 posts, or 20 percent performed below 1X. That means a whopping 80 percent of Whole Foods’ Instagram posts that mention avocado performed above average! This is pretty amazing and if I was talking to Whole Foods, I would tell them to double down on images of avocado.
TrackMaven’s Impact Score can give you the context you need to measure your marketing performance over time and help you find ways to beat your average!
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