Our new REPORT Tool let us review the concepts behind the measurements of performance and engagement through the redesign of its Top rankings and its transverse classification of multi-social networks interactions.
As we announced recently, we’ve been working to make evolve one of our obsolecent feature in a brand new REPORT Tool, allowing you to check your Top Audiences, Top Contents or Top Profiles for the period of your choice and over all of the social networks you manage through Over-Graph.
This redesign has enabled us, by isolating the feature of ranking tables a.k.a leaderboards (Top), so as to offer a real transversal view over all the main key indicators related to the use of Social Networks.
Those key indicators are now reported in terms of performance and progress to help you identify the best of quality through the quantity.
And so this is the opportunity for us to reconsider some theoretical notions and some bias we’ve also had to do in order to provide the means of a transverse reading to all social networks and be represented from a global point of view.
Let us then start over from the beginning, with a small detour on Social Network Analysis in a logic of graphs and what we’ve drawn from it for Over-Graph:
1/ Understanding the nodes and links that connect those “things“
When we speak about the management and outcome of social networking activities, we initially start from the Identity and Message that you SPREAD, day after day, to your Communities. Sine qua non.
Then we observe the relationship between the Message received by their Members and more widely your potential Audience, in which then takes place a number of interactions more or less standardized.
Those interactions are from the Likes, to the Comments and Replies resulting from the Conversation that you RESPOND to in order to keep the ball rolling, or even more engaging actions bringing to the point of sharing of your Message and increasing its visibility by structural and viral effect of social networks.
This does in fact as the diversity and multiplicity of links that connect each other in a complex and rich interactions systems, as proposed by each of these networks in the form of constantly evolving personalized experiences, while making use of codes and standards to make them more accessible.
From there came the research and analysis of social networks, used as a new methodology for the study of online communities to highlight what contributes to the communication efforts of each Identity with a Message to express.
The ambition of Over-Graph regarding to all of this is to position itself over all these graphs (schematically, these sets of nodes and links interconnected or not) to provide the right tools and a more comprehensive point of view across all activities, be it the Facebook’s Social Graph, Twitter’s Interest Graph or Linkedin’s Economic Graph.
The Google’s Knowledge Graph still escaping us a little thus, maybe for alphabetizing’s reasons…
2/ Perceiving the strengths and dynamics between those “things“
When we speak of measuring performance and engagement, we refer to this ability to interpret more accurately the indicators to assess whether the reason for being and expressing identity through social networks create a relative sense compared to its objectives and communication activities.
Because it is indeed about existing thanks to the interactions that are built between Identity (profiles), Message (content) and Audience (communities ++).
Given the existing interactions numbers and volumes through each experience offered by social networks to Internet users around the world, it is necessary to prioritize and formalize a framework for interpreting with a macro / global perspective those relations among all components of each network.
And for this, it is interesting to approach the work of Mark Granovetter, a leading representative of the sociology of social networks and in particular for his contribution to the theory of the strength of weak ties and the spread of information in social networks communities.
His research covered existing dynamics, sometimes paradoxical or complementary links between weak ties (casual relationships which, in the volume, allow to diversify and expand networks / communities to new potential strong ties), strong ties (more proximity, sustained and frequent relationship potentially leading to a sort of fragmentation of the whole community) and absent ties (either no interaction or not involving specially significant exchanges).
We were inspired by this work for grouping interactions of each social network based on a certain “strength”, of a specific dynamic vector under the proper operation of each experience so as to spread information through different communication channels.
And so the set of interactions that we measure and restore from a global perspective are prioritized according to what this interaction costs to a member of a community in relation to what it pays in terms of visibility, quality, efficiency for the representation and animation of Identity.
- Weak interactions → those are the most “simple” actions which are the most commonly observed, starting from a click on content to click on a Like button, they are valued for their potential of Applause, that is to say their ability to manifest a collective form (relatively passive) of public approval;
- Medium interactions → those are the actions that generate the most exchanges (relatively active since reciprocal), which instigate the discussion through comments and replies,they are valued for their potential of Conversation;
- Strong interactions → those are the actions that involve the most members of a Community by carrying them as information relays. By helping to spread / share more widely the message, they are valued for their potential Amplification;
3/ Representing from the general to the particular those “things“
Thus, building from this model a classification of interactions in terms of engagement, it is then possible tomeasure and represent progress and performance of the most engaging Profiles and Contents and the most engaged Audience from a global perspective, by summing all the interactions across all Profiles from the various Social Networks managed. Then, to go into detail to observe the specific differences between each of your communities and assess whether it meets your expectations.
Below, the non-exhaustive detail of this classification, from the global to specific against a selection of the main networks:
Weak Interactions, vectors of applause:
Medium Interactions, vectors of conversation:
- —Comments / Replies
- — Replies / Direct Mentions
- — Comments
- — Comments
- — Comments
- — Comments
- — Comments
Strong Interactions, vectors of amplification:
- — Shares, Posts by others
- — Retweets and Mentions
- — Shares
- — Shares via Mentions
- — Repins
- — Shares
- — Shares
And here’s how this is redesigned in the new REPORT tool that already manages this macro vision of simultaneous interactions to Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and Instagram while being ready to implement all the others.
A demo is worth a big picture full of thousand words, we invite you to discover for yourself these reports on your progress and sort by your own rankings based on what interest you most.
the 9 September 2015
