How Have We Grown? The CASE Social Media Conference, Then and Now

Jen Doak (@jpdoak) is the online communications specialist at CASE.

A lot has happened in social media and advancement since April 2011 when the second Social Media and Community Conference took place in San Francisco. It was a different time then: Facebook had not yet discovered chronology, people were posting pictures of lunch without fear of faculty-member retribution and most folks were struggling with questions like getting staff on board, letting go of control and how to measure return on investment.

I had written a semi-serious post from that conference on my favorite quotes taken from the hashtag, and there are still many insights that I think  hold true and will for some time. For example:

• “Technology has created an environment where we don’t tell them what’s important: They tell US what’s important.”
• “If you don’t pay students, you may also exclude high-quality low-income students from being able to work for you. Pizza is not pay!”
• “What’s the ROI on social media? I don’t know; what’s the ROI on our phone system?”

But the state of social media at institutions has evolved in those 360 short days. Facebook’s got an IPO (and Instagram), Google+ has become the empty new McMansion development across the street, and attendees at the 2012 conference in Chicago have moved from “How do we get on board?” to “What do we do next?” and “How do we sustain engagement?”

Our stellar 2012 faculty had key insights on crisis communication, content strategy, social media in alumni affairs and fundraising, and recruiting students using social and mobile. Now that their colleagues have started to realize the importance of social media, attendees were looking at how to get their presidents tweeting.

Here’s a Storify of just a few of this year’s insights, again thanks to our enthusiastic #casesmc Twitter community. If you’d like to join in on the discussions (and often-wacky side discussions), you can do so on Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr. And check out mStoner marketing manager Mallory Wood’s post on resources, live-blogs and presentations.

How have you seen the social media and advancement landscape change over the last year? Which insights have you found evergreen and which need to be amended—or discarded?

 

Social Media and the "Four Rs"

Tony Burgess-Webb is the co-founder of Sociagility.

The annual planning season for fundraising is in full swing and as the economy continues to falter, achieving the best return on investment will be on everyone’s minds. No more so than in the area of social media. Yet many seem to be struggling with a framework for measurement which makes sense for the sector.

Most organizations across all sectors are still grappling with the issue of measuring social media. As Econsultancy’s State of Social 2011 report finds:

41 percent of respondents report that they do not have an ROI (return on investment) figure for any of the money they spend on social media marketing, while 26 percent say they can attribute an ROI figure to a tiny amount of the money spent on social media.

For how much of the money you spend on social media do you have an ROI figure?

The problem is that without full financial data—i.e. exactly what has been spent and what has been returned or saved—a real ROI calculation is impossible. Even more fundamentally, without a framework for setting objectives which relate to organisational success, any measure of social performance is fairly pointless. So I’d like to suggest a simple framework for applying social media measurement to the higher education sector, starting with the ”three R’s”—not reading, writing and arithmetic—but reputation, recruitment and revenue.

Reputation

An institution's reputation is first and foremost about the fundamentals, genuine performance, a really good student experience and value for money. It is also about the perceptions created both by the volume of information about a brand and the value of what the brand says about itself as well as what third party communications say. Social media impacts both. There’s no good reason why this aspect of social media cannot be measured directly via surveys or studies.

Recruitment

Generation Z (born between 1994 and 2004) is the age group most engaged with social media. This group expects its peers and desired brands to be engaged as well. Not engaging, or merely paying lip service, sends a strong negative signal and opens up a competitive advantage for other institutions.

Research by The Student Room shows that potential students value online sources most for evaluating the quality of the teaching experience, the social experience and other key section criteria relating to the experience they can expect, i.e. what do my peers think? What do existing students say?

Revenue

Social media and networks also have a part to play in two other sources of funding: Government and alumni. Not being present on social media platforms to showcase achievements and engage on relevant issues impacts an institution negatively. Among alumni, social media provide a natural way to connect which is not simply dependent on events and emails. With this group, more than most, tools exist for measuring the real impact of social media in achieving wider goals.

Return on social

Proving that social marketing in isolation delivers a real ROI is a fruitless exercise. It’s usually next to impossible to determine real dollar returns, just as for many other parts of the marketing or operational budget. The three Rs may or may not provide a suitable framework for some social marketers in education to show how their work adds value. But some kind of framework is necessary. Only by setting clear objectives and measuring the contribution social marketing makes, can we discern the fourth R—a useful, understandable and genuine return on social?

Useful resources:

• New metrics for social media
• B2B social media metrics need to match goals
• Best social media metrics: conversation, amplification, applause, economic value
• The social media ROI conversation [video]
• Measuring social media ROI: 3 things to consider
• How to create social media metrics that matter
• 12 marketing predictions for 2012
• Social media ROI not well understood

How to Use Facebook Insights for Better Engagement

Cassie Dull is the online communications specialist at Park Tudor School, an independent school in Indianapolis, Ind.

Ah, another Facebook change. But this is one to be excited about—an update to Facebook Insights for your Facebook Pages.

Insights, the analytics suite Facebook provides for page admins, is now more focused on helping marketers track fan engagement. If you can see which of your posts resulted in more engagement, then you can craft better posts to get your fans talking about you.

You can find Insights on the left side of the page under your profile picture. The overview is a great summary of how your page has been performing in the past four weeks. The four numbers across the top tell you your total number of fans, the total number of friends your fans have, how many people are talking about you this week, and the number of unique people who have seen your page’s content this week. A chart shows the number of posts each day, the number of people talking about you and the number of unique people you reached.

Two new stats to point out are “people talking about this” and “weekly total reach.”

• People Talking About This—The number of people who have interacted with your page in the past seven days. It includes likes for your page, likes for posts, comments, shares, tags and check-ins.
• Weekly Total Reach—The number of unique people who have seen content from your page in the past seven days. This may include fans seeing your content in the news feed or on your page, or friends of fans seeing that their friend interacted with your page.

These are important numbers for tracking fan engagement. The more people who talk about you, the more people you reach. When posting updates, think about how you can get people to talk about you. If homecoming is approaching, start asking alumni questions about their college days. Ask for photos of homecoming events and share fun school trivia. With the new Facebook Ticker, your fans’ friends will see when they comment on your posts, which means you reach more people.

The next chart on the Insights page shows you how your recent posts performed individually. It shows reach, engaged users, talking about this, and virality for each individual post.

• Reach is the number of people who saw that post.
• Engaged users tallies the number of people who clicked somewhere in your post.
• Talking about this shows number of people who liked, commented on or shared your post.
• Virality is the percentage of the people who saw your post and then talked about it.

This chart is a huge development in the tough task of trying to understand how posts compare in reach and engagement. The goal here is to look at which posts performed well and which performed poorly, and then work to optimize your future posts so that they are more engaging.

With Facebook constantly changing the news feed and keeping its EdgeRank algorithm a mystery, it’s always been a struggle for page admins to craft optimized posts to reach their fans and create some type of engagement. But now you can see for yourself which posts reach more people and get people talking. Looking at Park Tudor's data, I see that sports updates and photos are popular. Interestingly, all of our links are at the bottom of the chart—they don’t seem to show up in the news feed and reach as many people as our status updates and photos. I’m curious as to whether other institutions have noticed this?

The new Facebook Insights should help you to create a better strategy for posting to your Facebook Page. You can better understand how your fans interact with your content and you can optimize it to encourage fans to talk about you. As with any analytics package, the goal is to use the numbers to drive your content.

For a more in-depth look, check out the Facebook Page Insights Product Guide, created by Facebook.

Why Higher Ed is NOT There Yet with Social Media Marketing

Karine Joly is executive director of Higher Ed Experts, a professional development company, and editor of collegewebeditor.com.

Last week, Kyle James reminded us that the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachussets Dartmouth had just published the results of its latest study on social media use in higher ed.

With 456 interviews performed from November 2010 to May 2011 among a representative sample of 4-year institutions in the United States, the findings of this study are valid within a +/- 4 percent range.

While they confirm some widely-shared assumptions on the state of social media in higher education, these results also reveal some surprising trends.

• According to this study, 100 percent of colleges and universities now use some form of social media–be it blogs, Facebook, Twitter, message/bulleting boards, videoblogging, podcasting, Foursquare, MySpace, LinkedIn or YouTube. Unsurprisingly, Facebook is the most widely used by institutions–only 2 percent aren't present on the most popular social networking platform.
• YouTube follows with an adoption rate of 86 percent, just before Twitter with 84 percent and blogging with 66 percent.
• What's a bit more surprising is the jump in podcasting use compared to the previous year–from 22 percent to 41 percent. I really don't understand what could explain this surge and this makes me question the reliability of this specific data point. (How was podcasting defined to respondents?)

Is success in the eyes of the admissions officer?

When asked how successful institutions are with the different types of social media channels they use, more than three-quarters of the respondents reported all channels (with the exception of the dying MySpace platform) as successful.

So, all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds when it comes to social media in higher education?

Not so fast.

 

A closer look at the results of two other recent studies, namely the 2011 E-expectations Study from Noel-Levitz and the State of Web and Social Media Analytics in Higher Education I conducted for Higher Ed Experts, raises several questions about the very rosy picture painted by the study of social media use in admissions offices.

• When only 9 percent of prospective students and 5 percent of their parents have a Twitter account, according to the Noel-Levitz survey, how can 72 percent of the institutions see Twitter as a successful channel?
• When 66 percent (a 15-point increase from the previous year) of admissions offices use blogs and three-quarters of students and parents said they never or only rarely looked at college blogs, how good can the social media strategy of the admission office be?
• When 95 percent of admissions offices pat themselves on the back when asked to evaluate the success of their efforts on Facebook yet only 49 percent of the institutions–according to the Higher Ed Experts study–track Facebook activity, what does Facebook success look like for almost half the institutions?

Obviously, I don't have the answers to these questions, but I believe there's a real need to go beyond the "social media checklist" tactic and adopt a more strategic and measurable approach in higher education.

Now that everybody is on board, it's time to find out what works for the institution and stop what doesn't.

Don't YOU think so?

Takeaways on the Web, Social Media and Student Recruitment

Michael Stoner is the president of mStoner (mStoner.com), a marketing firm that works with education institutions.

At least 80 percent of prospective college students have a Facebook account, as do 48 percent of their parents, and they use them to view college Facebook pages. This data from the 2011 Noel-Levitz E-Expectations Report suggests how important social media is for student recruitment.

But "The Online Expectations of Prospective College Students and Their Parents," also confirms the importance of some more-traditional channels. More about that in a moment.

The report is based on research conducted by Noel-Levitz, which partners with National Research Center for College & University Admissions (NRCCUA) and OmniUpdate on the E-Expectations series. Researchers conducted phone interviews about the use of e-communications in the college search with more than 1,043 college-bound high school seniors throughout North America and 517 of their parents in February 2011.

Here are some of my takeaways from it:

1. Don't drop traditional recruitment channels right now. More than a third of prospective students said that an institution's, ". . . website isn't really an important resource for me." And 25 percent of their parents agreed.
2. If your website isn't in shape, you'd better take steps to improve it. Now. On the other hand, nearly one in five prospects said that if they couldn't find the information they needed on a website, they'd drop a college from consideration. And 57 percent said that they could think of an occasion when web content was so compelling that they became more interested in attending a college. When they visit a college website, prospects and their parents want info on academic programs and enrollment first. Cost is much less important.
3. Don't bother texting prospects. Or tweeting them. E-Expectations data confirm what I've been told by prospective students—they don't want text messages from colleges. And, neither they nor their parents are on Twitter.
4. Integrate social content with your website and move visitors to your social channels from there. Don't expect them to search social sites to find your institution. While teens and their parents are using social channels, they aren't using Facebook to search for colleges: only 27 percent of teens have viewed a college Facebook page. And they also aren't visiting college YouTube channels to any great extent: only 27 percent reported visiting YouTube or other video sites to look for college videos. But embed that same video on your own site and visitors will watch it—55 percent of students reported watching video on websites of schools they were considering.
5. Don't dump email just yet. Many pundits have sounded the death knell for email. And when Facebook launched its integrated messaging app, we were told that teens would abandon email for it. Well, guess what Noel-Levitz found? Of the teens they talked to, 86 percent used email and 93 percent of those were willing to give email addresses to colleges. [And just in case you missed it, in this survey, a higher percentage of teen respondents used email than had Facebook accounts.]
6. When you're fixing your website (see #2, above), make it mobile-friendly. While only 14 percent of teens said they looked at a college website on their cell phone, all data point to burgeoning use of smartphones and tablets for web access. Be in a position to surprise mobile visitors to your site, including early-adopting prospective students and parents.

During the same week that Noel-Levitz released these results, I saw data from a Nielsen study of shoppers conducted in July 2011. Nielsen found that materials mailed to home addresses and emails from retailers both had high usage among consumers (67 percent) as opposed to ads on social media sites (45 percent). Maybe teen behavior when shopping for colleges is more a reflection of the larger culture than we often believe.

Of course, your prospects may differ. Which is why it's always smart to know your own applicants, rather than relying totally on aggregate research data, no matter how trusted the source.

Social Media that Gets Results

Michael Stoner is the president of mStoner (mStoner.com), a marketing firm that works with education institutions.

In April, I spent several days locked in a room with more than a dozen other folks judging the websites and social media initiatives entered in the 2011 CASE Circle of Excellence awards program. Imagine looking at hundreds of websites, Facebook pages, blogs and Twitter feeds—and then arguing over what works well and what doesn't with a bunch of smart, plugged-in and opinionated people. It's inspiring and, at times, stupefying.

Here are some characteristics of the award-winners that are worth emulating if you want your social media initiatives to be effective.

1. When you define your challenge, be as clear as you can about it.

Last year, William & Mary's mascot search won a gold medal. The challenge faced by Susan T. Evans, who led the initiative, was a directive from President Taylor Reveley to pick a mascot for the college's Tribe athletic teams and to make it fun.

One of this year's gold award winners was the University of Nottingham's Election 2010 blog, created to draw attention to the university's political scientists as expert commentators on the elections in the U.K.

2. Determine who your target audience is.

Are you targeting prospective students? The media and influencers? Your internal community? Your strategy and tactics will differ depending upon your answer to this question.

Consider St. Edwards University's socially connected graduation, which was powered by Whrrl, a location-based game. St. Edwards understood that although people know Facebook, they wouldn't be familiar with Whrrl. To address this, they conducted trial runs and provided simple instructions on how to use the tool. That led to audience participation—and amusement from those who didn't participate as the Whrrl stream was displayed on large screens during graduation ceremonies.

3. Don't rely on a single social channel.

For many institutions, it's essential to have a well-administered presence on Facebook. But, having an excellent Facebook page or a president or chancellor who tweets or blogs, isn't a social media strategy.

Effective social media programs usually rely on multiple channels. The University of Nottingham used a blog, YouTube—and good, old-fashioned media relations—to achieve stellar results with its Election 2010 program. William & Mary's mascot search involved blogs, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, email and even some print ads.

You could say that William & Mary's blogs—a gold award winner this year—are a "single channel." What makes them particularly impressive is their scale, including the number of participants and how the college integrates blog content within relevant areas of WM.edu.

One of the big differences between entries for the "best in social media" category this year versus previous years was the fact that many institutions entered programs that relied on multiple social channels. We took this as a clear indication of the growing sophistication of social media use.

4. Muster the power of your internal community as well as your external audience.

One of the impressive characteristics of William & Mary's blogging program was the fact that there were 63 active bloggers including students, staff and faculty. The blog posts were authentic while being on message.

The University of Nottingham's Election 2010 effort involved 14 professional and academic staff members who were blogging, tweeting and publicizing both the blogs and the university's experts to the appropriate media.

5. Develop yardsticks that will determine the success of your effort.

We know that it is difficult to project the success of a social media-based campaign, but jumping in without a sense of what you'd like to achieve is not a wise approach. Here are a few of the University of Nottingham's objectives for the Election 2010 project. Note that some don't pertain to social media at all.

• involve at least four new academics in media activity by the end of the campaign
• position Nottingham academics as key political commentators
• generate at least 20 pieces of national and international coverage
• support recruitment activity and help increase admissions applications by at least five percent

It helps that the university exceeded all these goals. But without explicitly stating them up front, who would know how successful the Election 2010 program was?

Much of this sounds like smart strategy for just about any successful effort whether a media relations campaign or a recruitment program—and to a large extent, it is. Institutions are still learning how to manage Facebook communities effectively or use Twitter to its best advantage. But that doesn't mean that what we've learned about being successful in public relations or alumni relations doesn't transfer to social media. It does.

What Can Social Media Analytics Do for Higher Education?

Karine Joly is executive director of Higher Ed Experts, a professional development company, and editor of collegewebeditor.com.

Measuring the return on investment of social media initiatives isn’t easy—definitely far more difficult than using Facebook, Twitter and the like.

However, while 68 percent of the respondents to the second CASE survey on social media practices in higher education think measuring the ROI of their social media initiatives is tough, it’s not impossible.

It’s not even THAT difficult.

You just need to learn how to use social media analytics—and then get on the program (and if you want to find out where you stand when it comes to web and social media analytics, make sure you take my survey about The State of Online Analytics in Higher Education by Thursday, May 12).

Stephane Hamel, a certified web analyst and a recognized expert in anaytics, teaches the art and science of online analytics at the University of British Columbia and the University of Laval. As one of the rare university instructors in this specific area in North America, he has a very different perspective on social media ROI than most in higher education.

That’s why I was curious to hear Stephane's take on some of the questions that were raised after the CASE survey results were released last month. I think you'll find his answers interesting.

1. Many in higher education think it’s impossible—or very difficult—to measure social media outcomes and ROI. Is it?

Yes, indeed, it’s not easy. But it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it! Measuring outcomes starts by defining our goals—are we into social media to boost our ego and get the most Twitter followers and Facebook likes or are we into it to rally new students, create a sense of community or simply better serve them by communicating where they are? I like to think of social media strategies in four quadrants ranging from negative/positive sentiment on one end, and level of activity on the other. Should we engage (positive/high activity), observe (positive/low activity), watch & respond (negative/low activity) or enter into a dialog (negative/high activity)? This, in turn, will drive what we should measure.

2. Some institutions have started to rely on Klout scores to measure their social media activities, what do you think about this practice?

Klout and other tools are a starting point but they measure the microcosm of social media. They certainly don’t measure the real business outcomes such as enrolling new students and making sure they are satisfied—just like any other business in fact!

3. Can you share one thing institutions can do to better measure the results of their social media activities?

Very simple: define your social media objectives. Do they align with your core strategies and values? It’s amazing the number of organizations that are jumping on the social media band wagon because they’ve been told they need to be there, but have absolutely no clue as to why, exactly, they are doing it. It is fine to experiment and make the jump, but it’s much better to define clear objectives. And no, having thousands of followers or doing it only for “brand awareness” aren’t good objectives in themselves. Social media marketing needs to lead to something else!

Have YOU defined clear social media objectives at your institution? What are they?

Social Media & Advancement Survey 2011: Changes, But Not Big Ones

Michael Stoner is president of mStoner. He co-presented the key findings of the 2011 social media survey at the CASE Social Media and Community conference in April 2011.

While advancement offices at many institutions are engaged in using some social media platforms (especially Facebook, which 96 percent of institutions utilize), institutions are still struggling with how to manage social media. And there weren't significant shifts in usage, management or other trends since our first survey was conducted in April and May, 2010.

These are key findings from the 2011 survey of social media in advancement, which mStoner conducted in February and March in partnership with Slover Linett Strategies and CASE. The first survey was released in July 2010.

I'll report briefly on some of the findings in this post. You can download the topline findings and a presentation about them that Cheryl Slover-Linett and I did at CASE's Social Media and Community Conference last week. We're working on a white paper further analyzing the data, which we'll release at the CASE Summit in July.

What Institutions Do

Institutions utilize an array of the most popular social media platforms: 75 percent use Twitter, 66 percent use LinkedIn or YouTube, 40 percent have blogs, use Flickr, or offer a social community developed by an outside vendor. Only 4 percent don't use social media at all.

Top goals for social media remain alumni engagement (at 84 percent of institutions responding) and strengthening brand image (75 percent); also engaging prospective students (68 percent of respondents), admitted students (63 percent), increasing awareness and rankings (61 percent). But only 38 percent of development offices use it for fundraising.

Staffing for social media varies across institutions. At the institutional level, 25 percent of institutions have at least one person working full-time on social media. It's far more common for staff to have social media responsibilities incorporated into their jobs, along with other responsibilities: at the department level, roughly .5 FTE focuses on social media.

There were some changes since 2010:

• The use of Twitter has increased.
• While institutions struggle with social media, they believe that it has value and that it's here to stay.
• More institutions have the IT and content management resources they need to augment their social media activities.
• More institutions have policies on legal and privacy issues and negative postings.

Success with Social Media

Again this year, we asked institutions to report how successful they are with social media and 62 percent reported that they are moderately successful with their social media initiatives, measuring success by the number of touches (friends, fans, comments, likes, etc.) they receive. Facebook is viewed as the most successful social media platform (by a large majority, 87 percent of institutions). They're still challenged by staffing, lack of full support and buy-in from senior staff and lack of readily available expertise and funding.

Institutions that are successful report a number of characteristics: they have specific goals for their social media; they are less spontaneous and plan more; they have institutional buy-in and support for their social media activities; they control social media content and staff with their own department; they use multiple social media platforms and target multiple audiences; and they are more likely to have policies. They are also more likely to evaluate their success in multiple ways.

Looking ahead to 2011, we'll see institutions creating social media plans (51 percent), expanding their activities to new audiences (46 percent), adding new social media tools to current programs (44 percent), and developing formal policies (37 percent).

Two Ways to Measure Social Media

Andrew Shaindlin is an independent advancement consultant who delivers workshops, seminars and presentations worldwide. He is also a faculty member for the 2011 CASE conference on Social Media & Community.

Measuring social media activity is a very hot topic.

In its simplest form, measurement of social media activity takes one of two forms. Organizations generally measure either:

the things the organization does,

or 

the things its audience does.

For example, an alumni association might post a series of photos on Facebook. Later, when reporting on its activity, the association would include the number of photos shared on Facebook.

Alternatively, there might be a number of "Likes" on the photos, plus comments from alumni or students. These comments are "user-generated content" and will be reported as outcomes of the photos having been posted.

The first kind of metric ("what the organization does") shows only how active the organization is (inputs).

The second metric ("what the audience does") shows the type and quality of interaction the inputs generate (outcomes). To assess your social media effectiveness you need to identify, record and compare both kinds of activity over time.

Knowing you posted a lot of photos doesn't tell you anything about your success. Knowing alumni left many comments on the photos doesn't tell you much either – unless you look and see which types of photo content engendered the comments, and whether the comments in each case were positive, neutral or negative. 

By identifying 1) the inputs that trigger user reactions and 2) the kind of reaction each type of input creates, you can increase the likelihood that your content will engage alumni over time. 

This approach to metrics combines behavioral information (how alumni interact with you) with attitudinal information (how they feel about you), providing a more complete picture of social media outcomes than you would gain from recording and reporting only your own actions, or only those of your audience.

Combine this information with strategic goals for alumni engagement, and you'll be able to assess more accurately how using social media is helping you reach your objectives.

"Two Ways to Measure Social Media" is cross-posted from the Alumni Futures blog.

Related articles

• 10 Ways to Measure Social Media Engagement (singlegrain.com)
• Track Social Media Analytics with Hootsuite Social Analytics (lockergnome.com)
• Sharing Your Success: Bringing it All Together (adaptivateblog.com) 
• Chiclets Are Not a Communication Strategy (alumnifutures.com)

 

5 Free Tools to Benchmark Your Institution's Facebook Page

Patrick Powers is an interactive media manager at Webster University.

Facebook Insights can provide a wealth of information about user demographics, traffic patterns and overall interaction. It’s one of the best tools around when it comes to measuring the value of a particular Facebook page.

But what about the other guys?

If a social media presence is to remain a cut above the competition it’s not enough to measure the performance of a single page. It’s just as important to monitor industry trends and know the competition.

What type of growth are competitors seeing on their respective pages? How much influence does a competing Facebook page really exude? What’s my institution's Facebook page worth compared to those other guys?

There are a million questions one could ask but relatively few places to go and find the answers—at least without paying.

Here are five free services one might find helpful when it comes to measuring up against the Facebook competition.

Wildfire Social Media Monitor
The Wildfire Social Media Monitor application allows users to visually compare the growth of multiple pages and calculates growth rates for each page over a 7-day, 1-month and 3-month period.

It generates a slick graph and provides an embed code allowing users to place that graph wherever they like. The site also allows for the comparison of Twitter accounts and offers the opportunity to sign up for weekly alerts.

Klout
Klout has always been a great tool for measuring the online influence of Twitter users but last October the site added Facebook into the mix. On Facebook, Klout assesses how conversations and content generate engagement.

Social Mention
The analysis provided by Social Mention is a pretty all-encompassing one. While the site will pick up any mention of a brand on Facebook, it also scours Twitter, photobucket, YouTube and more. Subsequent scores rank strength, sentiment, passion and reach.

Facebook Grader
The HubSpot-powered Facebook Grader calculates a percentile score that incorporates the number of fans, the power of a network and the completeness of a page. It’s pretty straight-forward: A higher score suggests a higher level of influence across the web.

Social Page Evaluator
Calculating the ROI of any marketing endeavor traditionally assigns the effort a monetary value—the exact assignment the Social Page Evaluator attempts to make. The site offers two figures, the page’s current value along with its potential value.