Working on a couple of projects recently brought to light just how easy it is to all fall under the spell of the Echo Chamber. To help us all avoid the trap, here’s some of what we learnt (part 2 next time)…
Campaign evaluation: remember to explore the data before you look at the results
Here are some stats from a recent social media campaign aimed at building engagement and inspiring connections. The headline? 6 people in 100 reacted meaningfully with it.
These stats are interesting, because the brand wanted to evaluate the impact of the campaign, not just its reach.
What did the data show us?
- 1 in 4 comments had an original response to the campaign messaging. The rest were retweets linking to the campaign assets. People simply passing on the message without any further engagement. Low, passive impact at best.
- So this left us with 25% of the comments that were potentially interesting for evaluating impact.
- But, reading a bunch of comments showed something else. The campaign had been really successful in mobilising their base. Examining profile data and content we saw that most of the responses came from people working with or related to the brand.
- So the actual impact volume, on the target audience, was more like 6%.
- If we’d not checked, our analysis would have been heavily skewed by those already engaged with the brand. We’d be have been listening to the ‘echo chamber’.
It’s a useful reminder that we need to spend a little time looking ‘under the bonnet’ at the data and not be blinded by the headline results telling us what we want to hear. Easily done after late nights and hard work!
We found this when researching the campaign for a proposal. Weirdly, we were the only ones’ pitching for this work who looked at the data before rushing at the results. Surely, everyone should be asking these questions?
It’s a relatively simple process to get here. You just need to access to performance data from your campaign (any good social listening platform will give you this).
We’d be happy to share how we did this, give us a shout if you’re interested. Get in touch.
Next time: Be careful who you ‘ask’ for feedback
About L+LR
We are the Social Insights agency.
We make social data simple. Simple for you to know what’s meaningful, to find new insights, to see opportunities and to spark inspiration.
We’ll help you use social to find and understand the people that matter to you. So you can create the right experiences, engage new audiences and appeal to people in the best way.
People are busy, we’ll help you become something they want to be part of.