Beyond views, clicks, and signups: 3 ways to measure brand fandom
No matter how great your content looks, your social media ads and content placement ranking is dictated by search algorithms. The good news? No matter the algorithm at play, your true fans will always come looking for you online. So, we believe that an important question you should be asking is: Where are your fans?
Here are three things we prioritise when measuring and growing brand fandoms for our clients:
#1 Look beyond the numbers
When gauging the success of your content, it’s all too easy to focus on quantitative metrics, like clicks, views, and signups. But when it comes to measuring brand fandom, we advise searching for something ‘extra’.
“It’s not just whether people are liking or resharing your posts, but how they do it,” says our social media strategist Chris Halpin. “Somebody might reshare your post simply because they’re very active on Twitter, or they might take your content a step further by adding their own thoughts on top of it. It might be a review of your product, or just a photo of themselves enjoying it at home, something of a certain quality that you can then reshare yourself, to keep the conversation going. Fans are great at doing something ‘extra’, something that is extremely beneficial to your brand without you even asking for it,” he explains.
To identify this quality of engagement, practice social listening. Of course, it takes time to go through your social media feeds and find those golden engagement moments. But it pays off. Online bank Monzo has long relied on social listening to make sure it was building a product that its fans would love. Following that path, it also came across a Twitter trend that it couldn’t have predicted in 2019, when its fans were dressing up as its iconic hot coral card for Halloween. How extra is that piece of free advertisement?
#2 Celebrate what your audience is saying and doing
Advertising innovator Howard Gossage once said, “People don’t read advertising, they read what interests them and sometimes that’s advertising.” That’s still true today. So, to make sure that what you’re posting is truly interesting for your fans, you need to experiment. “If you’re seeing only one or two things that you post being engaged with, that’s a sign that you might be missing the mark on what your fans want to see or talk about. Take that silent feedback as an opportunity to fine-tune your content. When you do get engagement, that means you landed on a topic worth exploring – so do that,” Chris suggests. “Eventually, it gets easier. The more you refine your content to make it relatable and interesting for your fans, the more people will generate content on top of your content organically, which means less need for you to be generating new content every so often later.”
To get to that point, Chris suggests creating incentives for your fans to produce content in the first place. Furniture retailer MADE.com, for example, noticed that its fans were proud to share their photogenic homes featuring MADE furniture on Instagram. The retailer promptly celebrated these posts on its own Instagram page by featuring its fans, and encouraged more engagement by launching giveaways of its most popular products shared on the platform. And it didn’t stop there: MADE.com is also featuring the resulting user-generated content on its website. This way, the retailer keeps its fans happily on the spotlight and its products pages up-to-date with beautiful photos of real-world homes.
#3 Identify your super fans and ask them questions
It’s clear that paying attention to what your fans are saying is crucial for ensuring a successful communication strategy. But it can be tricky to listen to every single one of your fans if you’re lucky enough to have loads of them. The tip here is to identify who your super fans are: that group of people who’ve been supporting you from the start, or who are the loudest in advocating for your success, or who most actively share feedback that you can take on board. When you identify those individuals, pay even closer attention to them and make your communication really count. “People want to see their time and care being reciprocated. So if you have fans, you should celebrate and nurture them, show them the attention and care they deserve. Brand fandom is all about the collective, but it is also about individuals creating a movement around your brand. Nurture each individual as much as you can,” Chris suggests.
Adopting this hyper-personal approach can result in opportunities that are beneficial for fans, brands, and content creators alike. That’s what singer-songwriter Charlie XCX landed on at the start of 2020. While stuck at home during COVID-19, she turned to her fans on Instagram to ask for feedback and support, inviting them to take a step beyond just following her work and actually co-creating it with her via Zoom. The result? Her latest album, How I’m Feeling Right Now, produced entirely in a DIY fashion in collaboration with her fans, to their delight – the album ranked #4 on the iTunes chart during its debut in May 2020.
While they all involve active listening, there are many ways to measure brand fandom. What’s right for your brand will depend on many factors, from what kind of brand you are and what platforms you use, to the specific timing and purpose of your marketing campaign. Finally, Chris reminds us, brand fandom metrics need to be leveraged against the specific goals of your campaign: Do you want to win more fans, quickly, or do you want to nurture long-term relationships with your most loyal followers?
Every brand’s goals (and fans!) are different, so learning how to measure brand fandom is only half of the work. Ready for the next step? Let us develop a custom strategy for building a fandom around your brand.
To learn more, why not book in a fandom workshop with our team?