Measuring The Impact of Your CSR Campaign with Social Media Analytics

These days, people expect more from their favourite brands – not just great products, high-quality services and clever advertising, but also socially responsible messaging and support for charitable and social causes.

At Zavy, we believe in corporate social responsibility (CSR) on social media – not just because it can do good in your community, but because it epitomises some of our favourite aspects of online marketing.

We’ve talked about the social media campaigns that nailed CSR and made a real difference, and we’ve even written a whitepaper that dives into the research. We found that done well, CSR campaigns can help you create all the great stuff you hope for in a social media campaign – meaningful engagement, positive sentiment, real-world impact and measurable results.  

That last point – measurable results – is key.

Why analysing CSR posts is crucial

Feel-good posts may make you, well, feel good, but if you’re a marketer, you’ll understand why measurable results are so important. If you can’t accurately track, quantify and record the impact of your CSR activity, you can’t justify it as a business expense. Like any marketing activity, it’s hard for your accounts team to approve spending on CSR as a strategy if there aren’t hard numbers to back it up.

Social media analytics can also help you refine and perfect your campaigns. When you start, you can make an educated guess about the tone and type of posts that will work with your audience, but guesses aren’t enough to inform a truly strategic approach. Content needs to be tailored to your brand, your voice, your cause and your audience to really cut through.

The more information you can gather about your performance on a specific campaign – including benchmarking against previous work and other brands – the easier it is to create impactful campaigns in the future. It’s about finding out what works and continuing along that path.

Your tracking toolkit  

It’s one thing to understand why you need to measure results – the how is another story entirely. When you run a campaign, you can get a feel for its impact early on, but putting that feeling into numbers is trickier.

After years in the business, we know all about analysing results on social. When we’re looking at the impact of a CSR campaign, we focus on three key areas:

Social Media Engagement

This is about the quality of the response – not just the quantity. Likes are fine, but shares show that your content is resonating with your audience on a different level.  

Here’s how to use this metric:

• Compare the number of likes to the number of shares – whether that means Facebook shares, retweets, or shares on Instagram. If you’re receiving a high number of likes but very few shares, it could mean that your content isn’t quite hitting the mark.
• To find your ‘amplification rate’ add up the number of times a post was shared, divide by the number of followers you have, and multiply by 100. This gives you an amplification percentage – the higher, the better.
• Remember that competition posts can skew the results when it comes to engagement. If you’re running a competition that requires people to share for an entry, they’ll be sharing in the hopes of winning, not because they’re particularly passionate about your message.  

Social Media Sentiment

Sentiment analysis lets you drill down into your audience response – rather than just seeing likes and shares, you can get an idea of how people feel about your content. After all, sharing isn’t always a marker of a positive response – many posts are shared because people are angry or upset about the content.

Here’s how to gauge audience sentiment on your posts:

• Look at the comments on your posts – what are people saying? Is there disagreement between commenters, or is the conversation mostly aligned?
• Are comments generally kind and civil, or angry and upset? If you need to step in and moderate, it’s a sign of a controversial post or campaign. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it’s important to know what’s happening.

Social Media Benchmarking

Benchmarking means looking at your performance in context, giving you deeper insight into how your campaign activity is working. Rather than a raw number – 1000 likes or a 1.2% engagement score – it’s about how your performance measures up against similar brands or your past work. It’s another way to figure out what’s working, and what’s missing the mark.  

Here’s how to benchmark your performance:

• Keep a close eye on the social feeds of similar brands, particularly if they’re doing similar CSR work to you. Check out likes, shares, comments and audience numbers, just as you would with your own work. How do your results compare?
• When you begin a new campaign, compare results with older work – this is partly why it’s so important to track and measure. Is engagement higher this time around? Is sentiment still positive, or has it taken a turn? It’s not an exact science, but the more you can piece together, the better.
  

Try, measure, refine

There’s no one path to a successful CSR campaign. It’s about trying something new, measuring the results and using that insight to inform your next campaign. The more accurate and in-depth your analysis, the more you’ll be able to tailor future work to your audience.

Zavy can’t create a campaign for you – but our social analytics tools can give you serious insight into your performance. Our social listening tech makes short work of sentiment analysis, gathering and interpreting conversations from across social media to give you a single ranking – the higher, the better.

Similarly, our Scoreboard makes benchmarking simple. We compare your social media content and audience engagement to similar brands across New Zealand and Australia and give you a score that shows exactly where your performance sits. It’s a crystal-clear performance metric, distilling overall campaign work into a single, comprehensible number.

Although it’s possible to analyse the impact of your CSR campaigns on your own, Zavy’s tools eliminate much of the complexity. You get the hard numbers and in-depth insight you need to justify your work, without slogging through comments or adding up likes.

Want to find out how to successfully incorporate CSR into your social strategy? Download our whitepaper now.