Comments

This indicator shows the extent to which the targeted audience engaged with your content by posting a comment. Such an action requires more effort than, for example, giving a like; therefore, it could be seen as a good metric. However, the content of many comments often does not represent a valuable engagement with the communicated content. Therefore, consider whether it is worth using this indicator as a key metric to measure the results of a social media campaign.

Determine the indicator's value by using the following methodology:

1) Decide what social media content you need to measure. Are you interested in the comments in all the posts on all the social media used during your campaign? Or a certain selection only?

2) Count the number of comments that different communication content generated. Avoid counting comments made by the campaign team members.

3) To determine the indicator’s value, sum up the number of comments the different communication content received.

Disaggregate the data by social media channels, positive / negative / neutral comments, and other factors relevant to the focus of your social media campaign.

1) Remember that comments can be both positive and negative, so receiving a high number of comments is not automatically a good thing. For example, you might have reached users that dislike the communicated content and write negative comments. While you can disaggregate comments by whether they were positive / negative / neutral, it needs to be done manually and, therefore, can be time-consuming.

2) In addition to reporting on a number of comments, consider doing a deeper analysis of what people actually say in their comments. Use such feedback to adjust the campaign’s future communication content.

3) Receiving, for example, 100 comments while your reach was 4,000 social media users is something completely different than when your reach was 50,000 users. Therefore, when reporting the number of comments, always mention the reach.