Social Engagement Explained
Long story short, social engagement measures how people interact with each other through social media. Then, social engagement metric measure how customers interact with company over the internet. For today, social engagement metrics on micro blogging like twitter are explained as below,
- Followers: The number of Twitter accounts subscribed to the account in question
- Follower to Following Ratio: Indicates popularity. Measures how effectively the account gets followers without having to follow back. An account with 5,000 followers and following 500 other accounts would have a ratio of 10:1.
- Mentions per Tweet: Indicates the effectiveness of individual tweets in generating mentions. This number compares the number of times the account has been mentions with the number of times the account has tweeted.
- Tweet Timing: Shows frequency of tweets throughout the week. Counts the number of times that an account tweets each day in increments of two hours.
- Followers by Region: Shows Numbers of followers in each geographic area.
Social Engagement with INFOGRAPHIC
In order to illustrate the concept, I create the infographic using twitter account data of UPS and Fedex as below,
Social Engagement for Supply Chain Improvement
I try to figure out how to apply social engagement to supply chain management context and some ideas are presented as follows,
- Number of followers increase/decrease over time, so it might be a good indication of operations performance. Finding correlation between number of followers and traditional supply chain metrics using regression analysis may yield some insights.
- Many supply chain practitioners conduct customer survey every year. You may gain additional information if you send survey questionnaire to your followers. You can also determine how your followers react to certain product/service introduction via tweets.
- Followers data is the public data. Try to analyze your competitors' followers, approach them politely and ask why they prefer your competitors to you. I'm absolutely sure that you will gain new perspective and information will be valuable to performance improvement program.
- Analyze what kind of tweets get picked up by your followers / competitors' followers. If you're currently use six sigma, this information can be translated to "Critical to Quality (CTQ)".
As you can see, social engagement metrics can be used to benchmark your performance against your competitors, collect customer feedback and identify areas of performance improvement. If you find this post helpful, don't hesitate to share it with your friends!