You might have noticed a colourful scoreboard sitting on the B&T homepage this month. Well, allow us to formally introduce ourselves – and it. We’re Zavy. And we believe in the promise of social media: brand building by two-way engagement and rich communication.
What does this have to do with a scoreboard?
We all know that brand marketing is vital for the long-term health of a business. We also all know that monitoring and improving your brand marketing is critical to success.
In traditional media, there are accepted ways of doing this: brand tracking, market research – you know the drill.
Not so much in social. It can feel like the wild west. What metrics matter when we want to know the impact of our social media activity on our brand? Do we put our faith in what’s provided by the channels themselves? What combination of post-by-post stats add up to a healthy brand on social?
That’s where this scoreboard comes in.
The Scoreboard on this website ranks top Australian brands based on their Zavy score (we’ll get to that in a minute). Each company is ranked based on a rolling thirty-day view of performance, with changes calculated daily. Being an index, a score of 100 illustrates that the brand is ‘on par’ against the other brands.
It’s interactive, so you can filter between different social channels and see who is leading where. Best of all, it gives a competitive view. We’re marketers too. We love to know when we’re winning.
For example, this week, we can see that overall, the NRMA is #1, with a Zavy score of 373, but Bunnings is winning on YouTube and Instagram, and Foxtel, with a whopping 1,576, is smashing it on Twitter.
Looking under the hood of the Zavy score
Back to that question we posted at the top – what metrics matter? At Zavy, we knew we had to filter out the noise, the impressions, engagement, views, comment stats, to create one metric – the Zavy Score – to track brand on social.
We drew on a wide data set, including retail data, public social media pages and posts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube, and spending activity of over 2,500 businesses to link social media activity with revenue outcomes.
From this, we were able to establish the relationship between positive social media activity, sentiment and revenue growth. This research is the foundation of the algorithm driving the Zavy Score – and powering the B&T Scoreboard. Long story short, it’s an industry-leading measure for brands who are serious about understanding their brand on social.
We use the Zavy Score as a way to track brands’ social media over performance over time, too. For example, it’s not unusual for the NRMA to lead on the scoreboard – they consistently get high scores.
But what makes a good score?
You instinctively know this already: brands that inspire rich engagement tend to have the highest scores. This is borne out in our research:
- Engagement has the highest correlation to growth.
- Presence and reach has a lot to do with growth, but ultimately the greatest ROI on social media marketing comes from driving strong engagement from that presence.
The Zavy score is weighted towards the engagement metrics that have greatest impact. For example, getting a like in Facebook is positive, but getting content shared has a greater impact. We also know that a positive comment is more powerful than a negative one.
That means that when we look within the Zavy dashboard at why NRMA performed so well this month, we can see that it was the strong combination of both high engagement levels and relative positive sentiment versus other Aussie brands.
Want to see your own scoreboard?
That can be arranged. Just complete the form on this page and our team will create a scoreboard for your brand. And watch this space. We’ll drop by B&T to share in-depth commentary on the movings and shakings on the board every month.