Popluence: A Practical Social Media Scorecard That Works

Measuring social media marketing is pretty easy- provided you look at one Facebook page, one Twitter profile, or one blog at a time. What’s not easy is reporting on all your social marketing efforts in a meaningful, consolidated way that senior executives appreciate and understand. Likes, shares, downloads, views…while each are valuable measures in their own right, have you ever wondered what happens when you combine them to create actionable insights and results?

Enter Popluence – a practical, tactical social marketing scorecard that you can download and use.

Why Social Marketing Measurement Is About More Than Just Numbers.

The benefits of using a scorecard for social marketing measurement go beyond the obvious “let’s track pageviews and followers” mentality. A social marketing scorecard is a bridge to better teamwork, better planning and better recognition for marketing teams. Here are four reasons why using a scorecard was important to our team:

1. Provides the entire team opportunities to learn. With a scorecard, a team has a reason to inspect all of the metrics, and review them together in regular marketing team meetings. Where were the gaps? What performed well? What actions as a team do we need to take to improve performance? These are all good questions that may lead to specific activities for team members. For example, sharing content via Linkedin or Twitter to drive downloads of content. And since using social at work is still relatively new for some, they have a chance to try out some new things.
2. Gives the entire team a reason to perform better. Just like Google tied bonuses to their own social media success in 2011, some teams may decide to follow suit. Why? Including a team-based component to individual incentive plans ensures everyone pitches in and helps out. It also means peers hold each other accountable when numbers fall short – and celebrate madly when they’re crushed.
3. Makes forecasting possible. Once you use a social marketing scorecard for two large blocks of time (ie. quarters or semesters) you can do two critical things: (a) Establish a baseline relative to past performance and (b) start predicting future performance against previous periods.
4. It puts a real number on social marketing activity. By creating a single score that summarizes all our activity, it’s easy for our team to track and remember how well we’re doing.

Popluence Rises.

Social media success is comprised of two elements. Popularity, how many people you’re able to attract to your social profiles, and influence, the behavior you drive through social messages and engagement. With this in mind, we felt the best way to demonstrate our social marketing prowess was by showing strength in both areas – popularity and influence. After a lengthy search trying to find a scorecard model that met our team’s needs, I couldn’t find anything. So I invented one.

Popluence is scored on a 100-point system. The idea is to achieve 100 points (or more) in the time period you’re measuring (ideally, a 6-month period). You score various social marketing goals, and each goal is weighted according to it’s overall value and impact to your business across two categories – popularity and influence. The weighting is key, because it allows you to put more value in areas you’re strong, and minimal value in areas you’re weak, or just testing. For example, if you put a ton of energy into creating video content, you’d weight that higher. If you’re testing Klout out as an influence measure, you might want to give a much lower value, thereby minimizing it’s overall impact on your score. Each category is also weighted based on what’s important.

For us, it was more important to recognize success in influence versus popularity (which we felt was a better indication of marketing impact) so our influence score was worth 60%, and popularity worth 40%, of the total Popluence score. It’s important to note that a 100+ point score is possible without 100% success in each metric. Because it’s a scorecard with relative weighting, overachievement in one area compensates for shortfalls in others. Or vice versa. This is especially relevant in the initial phase, when you might pull goals out of thin air, and you aren’t sure of how well various platforms will perform. This is why chose to insert a cap of 150% for specific goals. While overachievement is good, a cap keeps you honest and realistic. You should start by setting 6-month rather than full-year measures. This allows you to account for the rapidly changing social media landscape (when new profiles or platforms get added to the marketing mix, for example) as well as make some projections for the second half of the year, based on the previous semester. Ready for the really good news? The template does all this math for you! All you need to do is fill in the blanks.

Download The Popluence Scorecard

Here’s a Popluence template you are free to use. My only ask: Please attribute the work if you use it somewhere.

Download “Popluence Template” TSW_Popluence_Template.xlsx – Downloaded 840 times – 44 KB

While there is no shortage of social media scorecards, I still haven’t found anything like Popluence that gives our marketing folks a sense of accomplishment as a team, while also providing a simple way to report material progress back to the business.

Will this help your social marketing efforts? Are you using another social media scorecard already? Please let me know in the comments below!