Social media is no longer a novelty for big brands, and pretty much every company has realized just how important it is to engage with consumers through platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Like everything in the business world, brands want metrics to track performance, but that is not always easy with social media.

Share Rocket Inc. CEO and founder Chris Kraft says that anyone can find out how many likes a Facebook update with pictures receives versus one without, or how this week’s Twitter followers compares to last week’s. What is not so easy to determine is if those numbers are even good. Is 200 Facebook likes a lot? What about 2000? If you gained 30 Twitter followers last week but only 10 this week, is that a major drop-off or about average? These are the questions Kraft’s Dallas-based social ratings tool tries to answer.

“What does winning even look like in social?” Kraft said. “There is no way to high five when you score well because you don’t really know how you performed. It can be pretty demeaning for a team because you can never set a goal, cross it, and celebrate it.”

Kraft explained that there are many social media performance rating tools, but they do not tell brands how their numbers stack up where it really matters: against their competitors.

“If you’re an airline brand, you’re not competing with Pampers or ESPN, you’re competing with other airlines,” Kraft said. “Getting a few hundred new followers might be a big deal for some businesses, or it might not matter at all for others.”

Dallas TV networks race for the top of social

According to Kraft, Share Rocket solves the the problem of quantifying social media success by looking at a brand’s market share within its field, so instead of telling a network television station how it performed compared to all of Twitter or Facebook, Share Rocket shows how it performed compared to other network stations in its region.

Share Rocket already does this for major network affiliates around its Dallas headquarters, specifically for news broadcast programs on channels like WFAA 8-TV ABC, KTVT CBS 11, KXAS-TV NBC 5, and KDFW Fox 4.

The platform looks at the audience and engagement of not only the four major news programs, but also the social media performance of the on-air talent for those channels.

“What we’ve really seen is that the on-air team is becoming a more and more important element to the social performance of these TV brands,” Kraft said. “The ratio is as high as 50 percent of social engagement coming from the on-air team and sub-brands like sports and weather.”

Kraft said that some on-air personalities really dominate on social media. For example, he said that WFAA meteorologist Pete Delkus is “a rockstar” and currently holds a 12 percent market share.

Share Rocket’s platform can work just like a leaderboard for a given market, and Kraft said that different network affiliates can (and have) put those boards up on a screen in their newsroom to keep track of how they are performing on social from day to day.

Share Rocket not only compares markets at the network level, but it can also compare the social media performance of specific sub-brands or even people.

“In the case of local TV,” Kraft said, “we not only measure their main brand, but also sub-brands like sports and weather and offer the ability to drill down into each level. A network can compare its weather program against another network’s weather program, or compare one news anchor to another news anchor.”

“This next generation of tools are going to be very market specific rather than generalist”

Share Rocket distinguishes itself from similar tools by having a more laser focused platform that looks at a very specific subset of data, and Kraft believes that more future data tools will be moving in this direction.

“This next generation of tools is going to be very market specific rather than generalist,” he said. “Customers need customized tools that really speak their language and give them the data they need. We’ve really built a tool that’s tailored to their needs in their specific market, and I think we are going to see a continued trend of tools addressing specific verticals.”

He added, “Brands want data that is meaningful and has context, and most importantly they want data that is actionable. The future of data will be less about trial and error and more about making decisions with confidence based on accurate metrics.”

Photo by Jason A. Howie
Images courtesy of Share Rocket