Calculating conversation, amplification, and applause rates

- [Reporter] Every social network has their own metrics that are important but how do you measure progress across channels you have activity on? One framework I've found helpful for measuring the impact of social media across channels was created by Avinash Kaushik, the author of Web Analytics: An Hour a Day. On his blog, Occam's Razor, he talks about conversation, amplification, and applause rates by measuring social engagement as well as economic value. Let's go through a definition of each one and I'll walk you through a template that I put together earlier. So if you look at the template you can see you have conversation rate, amplification rate, and applause rate. And to calculate these, we need these figures at the top: the number of posts, the number of comments, the number of retweets slash shares, and the number of favorites slash likes. So for Facebook, if you had 81 likes, that number would go there. Tor Twitter, it would be favorites instead of likes. And doing this across channels lets you compare even things like YouTube, you know which has its own definitions of likes or favorites, and its own definitions of shares or retweets. So if we look at the conversation rate, that's the first metric and probably most important. And that is just the number of comments divided by the number of times you posted. So you can see here, the conversation rate on Facebook is much higher than on YouTube or Twitter. This is the most important metric for social because comments tend to get shown up in multiple people's feeds. So it's usually more valuable in terms of driving traffic to the site or driving brand awareness. Amplification rate is also very valuable, but people tend to retweet a lot less or, you know share a lot less than they do comment. An amplification rate is just the number of retweets and shares divided by the number of posts. Applause rate is the final one. This is the easiest to get, but still valuable to measure, which is the number of favorites or likes divided by the number of posts. So you can see that we have a very high applause rate on Facebook and that's much slower on Twitter, but yeah, pretty high on YouTube as well. So this is really useful for measuring engagement rates across different social networks. But it gets really interesting is when you look at the economic value from those networks. So if you're doing everything right with tracking you should be able to see how much traffic came from Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, as well as how much revenue that traffic generated. You'd be able to pull this from your Google analytics or whatever analytics provider you use. So you can see here that I got 177 visits from Facebook and those visitors drove $658 in revenue. So the economic value of a Facebook visitor is $3.72. This is really important to measure because you can see the economic value of Facebook visitors is much, much higher than for Twitter or YouTube. And you'll typically see this, different social networks, we work different amounts when you look at the traffic. Knowing how to do this is super important because using this framework gives you a consistent answer to am I doing a good job across every social channel that you run for your business.