One Partners

While this took a moment to get my head around, a couple of days ago I had a Eureka moment when I realised you could take your ‘TAT’ and divide it by your ‘Likes’ to arrive at your Engagement Rate (ER). FYI we love an acronym in digital. 

TAT is great because it’s a 7-day snapshot of the current engagement rate and overall health of your Page quantified by the amount of Likes, Shares, and Comments on your Wall. So from week-to-week, and depending the content that is being published, you can see if the content was well received (your ER is up), or if you need to rethink your yawn-content (ER was down).

Why so freakin’ excited I hear you saying?

It’s all out in the open now. Just as others can see how you’re doing at any given time, you can also see how other Facebook communities are resonating with their audiences. 

A page may have a massive number of Likes, but if their TAT number is low then it’s a likely sign that something is amiss. They may have driven large Likes initially, but now no one is commenting, liking or sharing with them. That community couldn’t care less about what the brand is pumping into their News Stream.

It’s now more important than ever to think like a content publisher and create reasons and meaning around consumers being involved with your brand – especially if you’re new to the Facebook bandwagon.    

Now all that is left is to determine benchmarks for ER. And its only fair that these benchmarks should be created against a rigorous set of criteria and categorised by segment – in the same way that the IAB has set out benchmarks for online advertising.

Social Bakers have had a go. Here is their stab at ER by community size, with the disclaimer being that the larger the community the lower we can expect engagement rates to be.

I would also argue that this ER should be categorised by segment. Fashion and entertainment would be at the top end of the scale, while toothpaste and soap would be on the opposite end.

I would also propose that there needs to be a bi-fold measure of ER by size and category that accounts for the ‘artificial’ drivers of Likes to a page – not that there is anything wrong with that! Promotional drivers usually take the form of:

Competitions
Seeding
Coupons
Reward programs

These drivers can inflate your TAT for the period that they are on. Can I coin this your ‘pro-TAT’? You let me know!

Good pro-TAT brings good results. A pro-TAT promotion targeted in the wrong way can attract a community that is there for a good time, not a long time. If these pro-TAT cats hang around then your ‘off-TAT’ ER is always going to be low.

Take for instance a ‘WIN an iPad’ pro-TAT run by a nappies brand. It attracts a large SINKS and DINKS audience and the numbers look great. But they are   probably going to experience difficulty maintaining a high ER past the iPad promotion, unless they start talking about music and clubbing. But then I’m not sure how valuable that would be to the brand… anyway… I hope you get my point.

When every brand manager I speak to at the moment is screaming that they want to ‘engage’ their audience, this is certainly one way we can quantify the effectiveness of that engagement – at least for the moment. 

What this means to ‘bums on seats, ‘$$ at the checkout’, or ‘footfall in store’ is still largely unknown (or so Google tells me). Perhaps some brands can share their experience of increased ER against sales figures in the future?

I’ll keep you posted on that front. If and when I manage to find a great source for fair ER benchmarking, I’ll report back on that too. In the meantime send me your comments!

Posted by Claire Ferguson; Onepartners Digital Business Director