What’s important in your social media strategy, likes, or actual engagement? That’s the question EzyInsights claims they have the answer to as they start pushing their social media analytics tool out on the market.
“Too many companies focusing on just likes, measuring their Social Media by just how many fans they have,” says Duane Atkins, the Kiwi CEO behind Helsinki-based EzyInsights. “If a company buys a bunch a likes it costs nothing, and management thinks they’re doing something, but that’s worthless.”
Atkins gives the example of a sales pitch at a major international company’s office in Helsinki whose marketing managers understood the priority of engagement. Despite that, the management from the top wanted them to be one of the top four companies in their category based on likes, which is a somewhat meaningless priority.
What Ezy Insights focuses on is on comments, shares, and likes on posts. It’s important for getting the word out, considering Facebook has famously nerfed how much traction a Page’s reach can get, unless the post has a high engagement rate. By drilling down into posts with higher engagement and offering actionable recommendations, those in charge of social media can then start tailoring their content to what fans actually like and share.
“Comments have 400% higher click through rate,” says Atkins. “That’s Facebook saying, ‘stop being boring'”.
Engagement is also important because people don’t really trust marketing these days. If a company is sharing “look at this cool product,” you’ll likely glaze over it. But if your friend is sharing a status update of a company saying “look at this cool product” then you’ll get the positive association of that brand through your friend.
Taking this a step higher, one of the new drivers of how companies extend their reach is through ‘brand ambassadors’, or people that have a large following and have a big interest in a company. Finding those key people, whether is a 16 year-old in Alaska, or a mother in France, can really help spread a company’s goodwill by helping target or reward these people. If you’re a company manufacturing beauty products, sending €50 worth of free samples or other rewards to a ‘brand ambassador’ could be hugely more viral and effective than a €5,000 marketing campaign that no one will pay attention to.
Due to this EzyInsights also allows brands to also drill down on their fans’ likes and reach, all from the public information they share.
Their tool is fairly simple, but Atkins says that this is by design. Social media managers aren’t necessarily data scientists, so while pivot tables and regression analysis tools can be powerful, they don’t have practical use for most marketing departments.
EzyInsights can also manually compile reports on post engagement, brand ambassadors, and so on for their customers. Manual work sounds funny in today’s startup environment, but they say some features, like sentiment analysis, need a human being understanding what’s going on, no matter how good their competitors’ algorithms say they are.
Today EzyInsights count DealDash, Stanford University, and Finland’s national broadcaster, YLE as customers. Additionally they have some big social startups in Finland and Sweden that they can’t name at this time.
EzyInsights participated in Startup Sauna Fall of 2012.
