Evaluation
Social media approaches are often used alongside
other approaches, rather than used alone, and often
get missed when thoughts turn to evaluation. This is still
a relatively new form of communication so evaluation
methods are still evolving. But it is important to think
about the ways that social media may be supporting,
or perhaps contradicting, the other activities you
are involved in, and how it might be possible to
demonstrate that. Keeping an account ‘alive’ can be
time consuming so we want to know that it is doing
what we want to it to do, and if it could do it better.
One of the challenges of evaluating social media
activity is knowing what it is we want an account to
achieve - what are our objectives in having an account?
Some aims, like publicising campaigns, problems,
or examples of incidents (for example) can be easily
measured in terms of ‘how many’ examples were
posted. But that is only an output measure of our
impact. We don’t know that anyone read them, let
alone acted differently because of them. We could also
look at numbers of ‘followers’, ‘retweets’, ‘favourites’
and ‘likes’ as an indicator of our reach. There are some
quite advanced metrics attached to most platforms
that allow us to establish these figures and, generally
speaking, high numbers are probably better than low
numbers. If we have a post that is frequently shared,
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and widely seen then we might conclude it has been
more successful than one that made no imprint
whatsoever, but these measures still don’t tell us if we
are changing anything ‘out there’.
Don’t forget that people choose which accounts to
follow or like - and they won’t be a representative
sample of the general population. So whilst we might
want to ask them questions, or get them to complete
surveys, we will only learn about what a self-selecting
sample think.
Metric measures of an account’s reach may be the best
we have, but it’s unlikely that a social media profile is
going to be the only activity associated with a campaign
or initiative. So if you are evaluating a new programme
of work, it might be best to look to other elements of
what you are doing for real outcomes, and to use social
media metrics to supplement that evaluation (with an
acknowledgement of their limitations). But make sure
that your social media work is co-ordinated with, and
supports, your wider work.
If social media is a big part of your work, consider
investing in some offline evaluation with key target
groups, such as focus groups or surveys. This can tell
you if your message is landing as you intended, who is
getting it, and who is missing out.