Editorial Articles

Since first emerging onto the scene as the Information Superhighway in the late 90’s, the Internet has undergone more changes than Trigger’s broom in Only Fools and Horses. The evolution of social media has changed the Web beyond recognition in recent years – it is simply not the same medium it was 10 years ago.

Inherent within the evolution of digital media is the equally important need to adapt and update the forms of measurement that help us quantify online prowess. Just as digital strategy has outgrown the hunter/gather approach to assembling an audience within the confines of a single umbrella url, it is also no longer enough to rely on page views and click-thru rates to assess the impact of online marketing.

Thanks to social media, the conversation has been taken off the supermarket shelves and placed into the online coffee-shop conversations playing out throughout establishments like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Indeed, you could not find a more concrete vindication of this trend than Starbucks. The coffee shop label is now the most successful consumer brand in the world based on social media success, with over 8 million Facebook fans, a growing Twitter base of more than 900,000 followers, and just shy of 7,000 YouTube subscribers.

It is this type of data that brands must strive to understand if they are to truly leverage – and prove – the marketing potential of social media.

Cue Famecount, a new digital audience measurement company founded in the U.K., dedicated to providing free and accurate tracking of the popularity of brands and individuals online.

The firm recently attracted widespread publicity on both sides of the pond with their study on the largest consumer brands in the world. Using the API data from Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, Famecount gives an aggregated ranking of the relative success of all social media entities across these platforms, which now hold an unduplicated reach of 84 percent of the total U.K. Internet audience, according to comScore.

“This data is unique in that it gives us for the first time an accurate global ranking of the popularity of brands online,” said Daniel Dearlove, founder of Famecount.com. “It is interesting to see established offline brands perform so strongly. This highlights the growing importance of social media in wider marketing campaigns, as well as the applicability of these channels to established brands.”

Just as the development of accurate site measurement helped facilitate the flow of ad-spend online during the noughties, quantifiable social media measurement will be essential for the emerging social media marketing sector to survive over the coming years. The marketing trade has always been dependent upon two components: while it is nice to be able to show brands that you have all the bells and whistles, it is equally important to demonstrate that they work.

In an industry that has so far struggled to justify itself as a truly quantifiable media through the likes of lucid semantics and buzz monitoring approaches, it is warming to see a company applying tried and tested “bean-counting” methodology to a medium in much-need of a reality check. What the Famecount numbers give is a real and tangible means by which to measure the success of social media marketing campaigns, and going forward that approach will be essential to the success of the industry as a whole.

Jamie Gavin
Director Jay-G Media
Famecount