the complete guide to conversation...

The Complete Guide to

on Social MediaCONVERSATION ANALYSIS

#SocialAnalytics2

TABLE OF CONTENTSIntroduction 1

Analyzing Volume 3

Unique People 4

Mentions 4

Potential Reach 5

Potential Impressions 5

Analyzing Influence 7

Audience Characteristics

Most Active Participants

Most Influential Participants 9

Most Influential Content 10

Analyzing Relevance 11

Analyzing Sentiment 12

Conclusion 13

The Complete Guide to Conversation Analysis on Social

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The Complete Guide to Conversation Analysis on Social #SocialAnalytics1

Introduction Social media has changed the way we interact with each other, creating public forums for all of our digital conversations. As marketers, the data available from these conversation presents an incredible level of visibility into our audience and what they’re talking about, but where do you start? And how do you hear through all the noise?

The process of identifying and breaking down conversations into something usable is tricky. In social marketing, this is known as conversation analysis.

Conversation analysis is the process of identifying and understanding conversations surrounding a brand, specific topics, or any selected area of interest. Conversation analysis can help frame the way you understand your social ecosystem, the way you speak about your own products and brand, how you interact with consumers by leveraging the topics that are already being discussed, and your understanding of what tactics and conversations to avoid altogether.


As a part of the social analytics framework, conversation analysis supports the planning process, and fuels tactical execution of campaigns and engagement programs.

In the end, conversation analysis works in conjunction with competitive and audience analysis to comprise a complete social planning process, allowing marketers to establish an informed social strategy.

When conducting a conversation analysis, there are four specific categories that can help you gain insight:

• Volume

• Influence

• Relevance

• SentimentThis guide will help you walk through best practices from each of these four categories and how you can use them to drive value and insight from your conversation analysis.


Analyzing Volume: Determining Interest and Impact Conversation analysis arms marketers with the ability to understand the impact of, and interest in, specific topics like their industry, product, or sometimes even their brand name or branded terms. Understanding interest and impact equates to understanding the volume of mentions and reach of a specific term, and can then be applied to analyzing influence, sentiment, and relevance.

When analyzing the volume of a specific term, think of your measurement in terms of a megaphone, with the initial conversation being projected to a broader audience. The metrics fall into place in that context.

Unique People How many people are using your selected terms?

Mentions How many times are your selected terms being used?

Potential Reach How many unique people are being exposed to your selected terms?

Potential Impressions How many times are your selected terms showing up in all users’ feeds?


Unique People Identifying the unique people involved is an important place to start. How many people are engaged in a specific conversation or using your selected terms? The number of people engaging gives you a starting point for the rest of your analysis, from mentions, to reach, to potential impressions.

Example: If four people, each of whom have five followers, use the term #SocialAnalytics, I have a baseline for measuring their level of engagement, influence over their followers, and levels of influence among their respective followers (more on this in the “potential impressions” section).

This chart from the Simply Measured Instagram Hashtag Report shows the volume of hashtag mentions, distribution between photos and videos, and the daily volume trend.

Number of Mentions Finding out how many times a term has been used during a specific time period gives an idea of whether or not there’s interest in the topic, and how consistent that interest is. By analyzing the volume and frequency of mentions, we get a good gauge of interest in that specific topic.

Example: If 20 people use the hashtag #SocialAnalytics, I can then compare that conversation to hashtags I’ve used, competitor hashtags, and the volume of other relevant topics.


Potential Reach By identifying the total number of people reached via your specified conversation, you can make better decisions about your brand’s involvement.

Example: Reach is a metric that has been around in traditional advertising and marketing for years. For example, if you place a billboard on the side of the highway, and 1,000 cars pass on average each day, your potential reach is 1,000 people. The same is true in social media. If the hashtag #SocialAnalytics is used by two people, and each of those people has 500 followers, that hashtag has potentially reached 1,000 people.

Potential Impressions An important aspect of conversation analysis, which we’ll dig into later, is influence. Measuring potential impressions can be an important metric for analyzing the influence of the people engaged in a specific conversation. Potential impressions mark the number of times a term may have been served up to users.

Example: If Joe has one follower and Joe Tweets the hashtag #SocialAnalytics, that’s one potential impression because one person potentially saw it in their feed. But if Joe Tweeted the hashtag twice, that’s two potential impressions. Now, if Joe has 1,000 followers and tweets twice, it’s 2,000 potential impressions. If Joe’s Tweet is retweeted or his followers use the #SocialAnalytics hashtag, that number grows exponentially, especially if those users have large audiences of their own.

This chart from the Simply Measured Twitter Activity Report shows the trended potential impressions for a keyword, calling out the impression peaks and total volume.


Putting Volume Analysis to Use: Asking the Right QuestionsUnique people, mentions, potential reach, and potential impressions aren’t the only metrics you can use when analyzing conversations, but they give a solid foundation to your analysis and act as valuable tools for benchmarking against competitors, analyzing period-over-period changes, and conversion rates.

Volume analysis equips us for several types of benchmarking activities:

• Period-over-Period Benchmarks: How is this conversation changing over time? Are more people engaging in this conversation than they did during a previous period? Have there been more potential impressions, signifying that more influential people are getting involved?

• Competitive Benchmarks: Are more people talking about this or another topic? Which conversation is trending? Is one gaining steam and another losing it?

• Comparative Benchmarks: How does this conversation, keyword, or campaign compare to previous conversations, keywords, or campaigns?

Once the baseline understanding of a conversation’s volume is set, we can dig into more qualitative analysis.

This graphic from the Simply Measured Instagram Hashtag Report highlights the conversion metrics all the way from unique people using a term to potential impressions of that term.


Analyzing Influence: Determining a Conversation’s ValueOnce your involvement, volume, and amplification (reach and impression) metrics are in place, you can analyze the influence of the conversation.

There are four main things to look for when determining influence:

• Audience Characteristics• Most Active Participants• Most Influential Participants• Most Influential Content


Audience Characteristics There are particular characteristics to focus on when gauging the aggregate influence of conversation participants.

Identify the average audience size of those engaging with your term to determine the social maturity of the participants, as well as the potential for increased amplification.

Then, you can use influence scoring platforms like Klout to measure and benchmark social influence of users engaged.

Most Active Participants Which users are most involved in the conversation being reviewed? Knowing who is the most involved with a specific conversation can be beneficial for targeting purposes, as well as best practices and insight around the aspects they find the most compelling.

These charts from the Simply Measured Twitter Activity Report show the breakdown of follower counts and Klout scores among participants. These metrics can help you gauge the influence level of a conversation.

This chart from the Simply Measured Twitter Activity Report shows the most active users associated with a specific conversation, and the number of times they’ve engaged with a particular term.


Most Influential Participants Analyzing the most influential users within a specific conversation allows you to identify where the biggest impact is being made, who’s making it, and why they’re making such an impact.

Example: If a specific user has driven 45% of the overall potential impressions for a selected term, you can dive into the content they shared, the sentiment around the topic, and the audience that was exposed to this topic.

Analyze the users who’ve driven the largest number of impressions, as well as the users who have the largest audience and those that drove the most engagement with their posts. These users will likely continue to have a big impact on this conversation, and a lot can be learned from their tactics and approach.

This chart from the Simply Measured Twitter Activity Report shows the trended potential impressions for a keyword and the Tweets responsible for the most potential impressions.

This chart from the Simply Measured Instagram Hashtag Report showcases the top users engaged with a hashtag based on their audience size, as well as the engagement on their posts within that specific conversation.


Most Engaging Content One of the easiest ways to understand who is influencing a conversation topic is to identify the content that has had the biggest impact. Whose Tweets, posts, or photos are driving the conversation? What made that content successful as a part of that conversation? It’s possible that the user has a massive audience, which is good to know, but it’s also possible that they used a tactic you can learn from and leverage within that conversation. For example, if you find that a user saw a big impact from including a Vine video or specific term, you can use that info to inform your strategy.

This table from the Simply Measured Instagram Hashtag Report showcases the top content containing a specific keyword, ranked by overall engagement or potential impressions.


Analyzing Relevance An important category of conversation analysis is relevance. How relevant is the conversation to my brand, and how relevant are the individual posts to that conversation?

There are some easy ways to identify and analyze relevance within a conversation. Chief among them is keyword analysis: looking at the conversations within the conversation, such as mentions of a specific product while analyzing a broader industry.

Other types of measurement could include analysis of participants in the conversation to understand the demographic breakdown behind a specific topic, or characteristics of the top performing content, like caption length, content type, etc.

Example: If I’m looking at the the term #SocialAnalytics and I analyze the profiles of participants, I’m able to identify whether the people using the term work in social media or are irrelevant users and bots that I should avoid analyzing further.

This chart from the Simply Measured Twitter Activity Report shows the most frequent keywords within a specific conversation.


Analyzing Sentiment In addition to relevance, it’s important to understand the sentiment around a specific topic or conversation. By analyzing which content drives a positive reaction versus a negative reaction, we’re able to zero in on the position of the audience involved, the overall feeling around the topic, and the specific components that evoke an emotional reaction.

Example: If I look at the sentiment around the hashtag #SocialAnalytics and find that, when discussing engagement, the reaction is generally positive but, when discussing conversation analysis, the sentiment is negative. I’m able to use that insight to develop an action program, like writing a guide that speaks to conversation analysis, hypothetically.

This chart from the Simply Measured Twitter Activity Report with Sentiment shows the trended negative and positive sentiment for a specific topic, including the content with the most positive and negative impressions.


ConclusionWhile there are many ways to analyze conversations on social media, there are four key categories of analysis to focus on:

• Volume

• Influence

• Relevance

• SentimentWith these four categories in mind, we’re able to analyze what people are talking about, who’s talking about it, why they’re talking about it, and how they’re talking about it.

By combining conversation analysis with both audience and competitive analysis, we have the foundation for a thorough social planning process, and a complete social marketing strategy.

Kevin Shively - Senior Content Marketing Manager - Kevin is a member of Simply Measured’s content team and the editor of the award-winning Simply Measured blog. In his free time, he likes to remind people that Forrest Whitaker once called him “pretty funny.”

Social Analytics Framework How Conversation Analysis Fits In Our social analytics framework below highlights the essential components of the process that enables marketers to plan and measure their social programs. Conversation analysis fits into the planning process, allowing marketers to understand trends and topics that are relevant to their brand, who’s involved, and where those conversations are occurring.

About Simply Measured Simply Measured is the most complete social analytics solution, empowering marketers with unmatched access to their social data to more clearly define their social strategy and to optimize their tactics for maximum impact.

Our goal is to put the tools to understand business data in the hands of business users. We think reporting should be simple, attractive, and accessible for everyone – not just data scientists. Our software streamlines the process from data to deliverables and eliminates the countless hours spent on everyday reporting tasks. We do this by putting cloud data sources at your fingertips, providing a marketplace of best practice reports, and allowing you to generate beautiful solutions on the web, in Excel, and in PowerPoint with a couple of clicks.

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