The Echo Ratio for Social Media Analysis

Today we’ve added a new metric to our mediasphere360 Social Media monitoring and analysis tool; we call it the Echo Ratio. So what’s that? Quite simply, we look at Social Media marketing campaigns or activity that we monitor for clients and can measure the viral uptake of a campaign, meme or discussion topic being monitored.

In Social Media marketing campaigns and with any meme or hot topic, the content delivered starts somewhere; someone “tweets” it out, posts to YouTube or similar and then finds Conversation Igniters to start the spread. In some cases it’s just a blog that someone posts and it takes off like wildfire. This often happens with high profile bloggers/thought leaders like Chris Brogan, Jeremiah Owyang, Seth Godin or Beth Harte.

For Social Media marketing communications however, a key objective is to have the message/story/content spread as far and wide to the influence group your targeting as possible. Sadly, it doesn’t always take off for a number of reasons.

With any topic or issue, there are only so many who will be interested in what someone is saying. We already measure for influence on an issue/topic/content so what we noticed in our research is that there is always an echo effect. The Echo Effect in Social Media is the result of a “group” that always bounces around similar content amongst each other, but the content seems to hit an invisible wall and spreads very little beyond the Echo Group.

So with the Echo Ratio, we can establish the general outline of an Echo Group and then determine the Echo Ratio which is a look at how much the story spreads beyond the Echo Group (often the Conversation Igniters that start the topic.) So a ratio might be 8:2 which means 80% of the conversation/campaign is staying within the Echo Group we’ve identified and only 20% of the time is the story getting to new eyeballs or ears. If you’re targeting a wide spread in your objective, this would not be good.

Of the 12 times we’ve employed this new measurement we’ve found a heavier weighting towards the Echo Group, but if the campaign is good and spreads this changes. In the first few days you may start at say 8:2 but as the content spreads beyond the Echo Group you’ll find it moving towards say 4:6 which means the story is spreading beyond Echo Group.

We consider this an important benchmark metric to not just campaigns, but for organizations themselves in ongoing online reputation management, online brand monitoring or in a Social Media crisis.

If you have further questions about our Echo Ratio or how we establish an Echo Group, feel free to contact us info_at_mediabadger.com for a quick chat.