Planning Time for Social Engagement

In Dan’s recent blog post digital consulting and digital strategy he highlights the need to plan for success and to be able to support digital campaigns; as part of many digital strategies the same holds true for social engagement. Andy Budd recently tweeted much the same sentiment:

“Social media marketing is like alcoholism. Getting that initial buzz is easy but keeping it going takes time and effort!”

Having an understanding of the amount of effort required to maintain a social engagement programme is clearly something that is key to digital consultancy. In the remainder of this post there are a few pointers on how to estimate the level of time required on a weekly basis to run and support a social engagement program. These pointers combine to build a simple spreadsheet model that can be used to plan and evaluate.

How will you use social engagement?

The first steps in planning the time required for social engagement is to list out which social networking channels you will be using as part of your digital strategy. Some channels and simple ideas are contained in my blog entry on social engagement. When listing the social networking channels aim to note down each social networking activity as a channel. So you may have a Facebook fan page, but you may use a number of applications on these, complete your list to the granularity of each application you are using as part of your digital strategy. To make it clear it is worthwhile noting the aims of each channel.

How proactive do you intend to be?

Within the social engagement part of your digital strategy how much content is being written / seeded per week? If you have a blog and/or Twitter account how often are you going to write blog posts or tweet new information. Each of these takes time and needs to be accounted for. In the spreadsheet list the social networking channels, how many times per week you intend to post to each channel and how long an individual post takes in minutes. Multiple the first by the second to get the time per week you expect to spend seeding each of your social networking channels.

How engaging will you need to be?

Social engagement is just that, engagement; you cannot start along a digital strategy of social engagement and not take the time out to engage your audience. Not all audience posts will be positive, there may need to be a degree of moderation. Some engagement will also require research to respond. Each social networking channel will also have by its very nature a degree of expected participation by an active member of your audience.

Within the spreadsheet place the columns social networking channel, participation, moderation, response time and response rate. Under participation for each social networking channel note how many posts an active user will post a week. Under moderation place the values 1 for proactive moderation (every post is moderated), 5 for reactive moderation (posts go live, but may then be removed after an administrator has reviewed them all), and 10 for community reactive moderation (members of the audience report on posts that may not be appropriate). Response time and response rate should be completed for the estimated time it will take to deal with an average post and as a percentage the amount of average posts that will require a response from the social networking channel.

Once completed the time taken per active member of your audience per week can be calculated:

(Participation/moderation) + (participation* response rate * response time)

The participation / moderation part of this calculation uses the estimate that each moderated post will take approximately 1 minute, please feel free to adjust for your moderation methods.

Define your audience

Each different social networking channel within your digital strategy will have its unique audience characteristics. For each channel note down the expected size of audience, the percentage of the audience that is expected to be active weekly and the human factor.

The human factor defines how much additional work may result from that audience, e.g. malicious posts etc. For the human factor place one if the audience is expected to result in a typical amount of work, lower the factor if the audience is expected to be easier and raise it if the audience is expected to be more difficult.

The human factor, size of audience and expected audience participation can then be multiplied by each other to generate a metric by which the channel audience can be rated.

Summing up

To calculate the weekly management time required for the social engagement section of a digital strategy the final step is for each social networking channel use the following calculation:

Proactive Engagement + (Audience Metric * Reactive Engagement)

Actual time spent to estimated time spent will of course differ over the time of the social strategy, but the above should be a good starting point.

This blog entry was written by Paul Bidder.