Measuring Social Score: the What, the How and the Why

You probably were wondering, what is that Octoboard Social Score that people are sharing around and talking about? You can check your Social Score at the top of Octoboard’s Social Dashboard. Let’s see what it means, how we are measuring your Social Score and, what’s more important, what do the numbers tell you about your Social Media activity?

I suggest that we start with the fun part!

We have divided our Social Score into 11 levels: you start with, well, a Start, then become a Baby Octopus, and can go up to becoming the Master Octopus. When you do, please let us know – these creatures are extremely rare!

How do you move up the levels?

• The first step is to connect your various Social Media accounts – Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, LinkedIn, Instagram, Google+, Pinterest, and VK. Obviously, the more you connect, the higher the score

• The second step is to understand how we calculate the Social Score. Just keep reading!

• The third step is to increase your engagement and performance across your Social Media platforms. We update the data on a daily basis, so you can see the changes in real-time

Octoboard & Social Score

Octoboard is a data visualisation product, a dashboard. It shows Business and Social Media metrics for companies, marketing agencies and individuals. Social Score was added to make it a bit more fun and also give an overall Social performance figure – a score for you to improve.

We have put some bits of logic behind our Social Score calculations. This is not an exact science. We are not claiming that we are building another Klout, but we believe our simple approach does reflect what most users value.

Nothing is static in our dynamic world, so we are now constantly analyzing data in order to come up with the formula that best reflects your social activity more accurately.

By the way, you can help too. Consider taking this short 3-minute questionnaire to answer a couple of questions on How You engage with Social Media. 

Take our Social Score questionnaire. We will adjust our Social Score calculations based on your feedback !

As you can imagine, the more social networks you connect to, the more data we can gather. We then look at your social performance across networks. All you need is to connect to them!

So, how do we calculate individual scores within networks to come up with the final figure? A little bit of primary school math hasn’t yet hurt nobody (not much anyway).

Basically, your Social Score is a sum of your engagement metrics (or user actions) and your engagement rates. Social networks report actions differently. Some have Tweets and Mentions, some have Likes, others “Plus Ones” (I know, right!).

In our Social Score we apply different weightings to each user action and add them up. Weightings are quite important. This is why we also collect your feedback to adjust them.

We like to think of Social Score as a recipe. Let’s elaborate on its every ingredient, how it’s calculated and why we chose these particular user actions and weightings.

Measuring Social Score on Facebook

As in any network, in Facebook we take into account two areas – Engagement (user actions) and Engagement Rate. They pretty much include all Facebook measurements that are relevant to Social Score calculation.

Below is how we weighed user actions that we can collect:

Let’s admit it: Facebook “likes” do not require too much effort from your Facebook page visitors, so they show the lowest engagement level. “Comments” and “Shares”, on the other hand, are already a sign of engaging content. “Shares” indicate the highest engagement, meaning you’ve passed the quality check!

We take into account Facebook Engagement Rate too. The formula is generously provided by Facebook itself, and we just couldn’t argue with it! Basically, Engagement Rate is your Engagement divided by Reach. Once it is divided by Reach, the metrics become comparable across different Facebook accounts – no matter how many subscribers or friends you have.

To learn more about Facebook metrics, read our post “10 Questions to Ask Facebook Daily”.

Measuring Social Score on Twitter

The two user actions we account for Engagement across Twitter accounts are “tweets” and “replies”.

In addition to Engagement we take Twitter Engagement Rate into consideration too:

Here we divide Engagement by Followers.

You can find more in-depth information on Twitter metrics in our post “5 Questions to Ask Twitter Daily”.

Measuring Social Score on LinkedIn

Here is how we weighted user actions in LinkedIn. Again, these are approximate figures that are being constantly validated and updated. But as you can see, we value Shares more than Comments and Likes.

Engagement Rate in LinkedIn is calculated by dividing all user actions by Impressions. Impressions is a metric that tells you how many times your content has been shown to your audience. Reach (number of people who saw your content) is a better way of getting Engagement Rate, unfortunately, it is not provided by LinkedIn API.

Measuring Social Score on Google+

For Google+, Engagement is the only measurement that contributes to your overall Social Score. Engagement is a true indicator of your performance, since the whole idea of Google+ lies within the concept of categorising your acquaintances and content to create a more targeted messaging in a world of a constant stream of irrelevant information.

Google+’s “plus ones” are what we conventionally perceived as “Likes”. Whereas, reposts and comments is what you are looking for across Google+. Keep in mind, that high engagement in G+ may be times and times more valuable, than elsewhere, since it is targeted messaging we are talking about.

Measuring Social Score on YouTube

YouTube, being overarchingly a video platform, has the same logic as any other social network. You should know, though, that  YouTube is the it-place for monetising your efforts, so your likes, favs, and total views can be your potential dollars.

Yet again, “likes” are an obvious basis for calculating your engagement score. Comments on YouTube deserve equal treatment as its counterparts – Twitter and Facebook, for instance. Adding your video to someone else’s Favorites is what attracts the highest attention – this is what translates into “shares” in a video world.

It is only logical to conclude that YouTube’s Engagement Rate would be measured by the total sum of your “likes”, “comments”, and “favorites” divided by your total views. The number can tell you pretty accurately how successful your video strategy is. It is a great measure of social performance across accounts and networks.

Measuring Social Score on Instagram

It is not indicative to be looking at “likes” on Instagram, they are too easy to receive, with a simple tap of the finger. They may tell you your visuals are incredibly attractive, but won’t provide you with any markup of quality. So it is comments you’d like to pay more attention to. To be really accurate, we have to analyse used hashtags and adjust the final number by taking into account bot activity. Currently, about 8% of “audience” in Instagram are bots. 

Unfortunately, Instagram API does not report Impressions or counts of people who saw your posts. To get to some sort of normalisation we use the number of Followers and calculate Engagement Rate this way.

Measuring Social Score on Pinterest

Pinterest metrics are something we are particularly proud to present. Certainly, it is a beautiful, visual and entertaining platform. But it is also a place, where your Social Media efforts can and should be measured. As across any other Social Media network, similar metrics logic can be applied to Pinterest. Approximate weightings are shown below.

“Repins” are the most interesting members of Pinterest family. Repinners are your potential followers (if you are an individual), or your prospective customers (if you are a business). In fact, 80% of Pinterest’s content is comprised of repins. Thus, whatever fraction of these 80% you acquire adds up to your engagement score.

We use Total Pins to calculate Rate. This is the only relevant metric provided by the API that can help us normalise Engagement across Pinterest accounts.

Measuring Social Score on VK

If you haven’t heard of VK, either you live far outside Europe, or have been living in a parallel universe. VK is the largest Social network in Europe, with emphasis on Russian-speaking audience. Basically, it started out as a Russian alternative to Facebook, but has grown into an entity of its own. With VK being influential across such a wide audience, its metrics are also something you should be aware of, and if you’re not there, you should consider joining it. After all, it will, at least, increase your Social Score and will give you a chance to become the Octopus Master!

“Likes” and “comments” are pretty comprehensible – they contain the same logic as in any other Social Media channel. “Reposts” are VK’s version of “shares”. However, since in terms of reposting (aka sharing) VK users are more generous, and asking for a repost (and getting it) is pretty effortless, reposts deserve a bit less attention than comments.

As in the case of Facebook, and we’ve already established that Facebook is VK’s closest relative. VK reports Reach very well. So we divide user actions by Reach – the number of people who see your content.

Putting it all together – the final number

Ok, we got your user action counts, we have applied weightings and we use Engagement Rate to help us. We then add up calculated and weighted metrics from different Social Networks. Each Social Network is also weighted. Once everything is taken into account, we get a really high number. 20.000 point or more. After that, we map this number onto a scale from 1 to 100. The final Social Score becomes a number between 1 (very bad) to 100 (brilliant) that you get at the top of your Octoboard Social Dashboard:

As for levels, well, if you get less than 10 in your score then you are only a “Beginner”, if you reach 10, you become “Baby Octopus” and so on.

Measuring Social Score: Afterword

Now when you know what the Social Score is, how it works and why you should care, we hope you’ll excel in the world of Social Media, and we are only here to help you track your success.

But in order to do that, we need your help, too! You can now participate in the development of our product – take our quick quiz to let us know, how YOU interact with Social Media. The sign-up is completely Free so we can’t see any reason why you wouldn’t take part. We will keep you posted on all the changes, that you trigger!

Please, comment on any questions, we’d be happy to help out and don’t forget to share your Social Score with the rest of the world!