Unmetric Evens The Playing Field With A Brand New Engagement Formula

Aditi Raghavan
August 8, 2014 • 3 min read
Updated on September 19, 2019
In the realm of rivalry, everyone loves the story of the underdog. Take a look at the movie industry, for instance. The underdog is the star of any good sports film. Unsurprising, really. Sports are the epitome of competition. Yet, is there a takeaway for competition on social media from movies like Rocky, The Blind Side, Rudy and A League Of Their Own? Indeed. It is that everyone regardless of stature or size deserves a fighting chance because they could come out on top.
Competitive Intelligence on Social Media should not be any different. At Unmetric, we just leveled the playing field with our new simple, standardized and customizable engagement score formula.
The Unmetric Theory Of Engagement
At Unmetric, our theory is pretty simple – big brand or small brand – everyone deserves to be compared in a fair, simple, standardized and measurable manner. However, on social, the idea of big and small brands is different from common ideology. A big brand isn’t the one with the biggest ad budgets. It’s the one with a larger number of fans or followers on a social platform.
Also, the way social networks are set up, just because there are 100 fans/followers of a brand out there, it doesn’t mean all of them are going to see a brand’s content.On the flip side, this doesn’t mean we only take into account the Likes, Comments, Replies, Retweets on a brand’s content ignoring the number of fans and followers. Why? Because the more the number of fans or followers, the more the number of Shares or Retweets for a brand. This has been proved empirically.
So, how do you treat brands fairly when calculating how engaging their content is? Did someone say Reach? It’s true, using Reach in a formula is probably the most mathematically accurate method possible to calculate engagement. Here again, it gets murky though for posts, tweets etc. can be sponsored. Thus, we are left with the question – If we use Reach as a factor in engagement, are we truly adjudging the merit of a brand’s content strategy or instead, are we giving a grade to a brand’s business smarts?
After rolling up our sleeves and delving deep into engagement data from multiple social platforms, our team came up with an answer.
A Simple Engagement Score Formula To Solve The Problem
Our solution to this perplexing puzzle is for every brand to measure themselves against the same proportional yardstick. In practical terms, this means we determine the merit or engagement of a post by three things:
- The audience responses on brand content (such as Likes, Comments, Shares, Retweets).
- The brand’s size (fan/follower numbers) and the corresponding number of people who could actively receive and view a brand’s content.
- All engagement scores fall and measure within a range of 1-1000.
This way a big brand is not unfairly penalized for having a lot of people like or follow it. Similarly, a small brand can still be awesome in its niche and recognized when it comes out on top – or to borrow from the age old saying on the interwebs, “On Social Media, nobody knows you’re an underdog.”
Users can view and customize our new formula as per their needs on the Unmetric platform. If you’d like to discover Unmetric’s new engagement scores, sign up for a free trial.