(this article was updated in April 2020)

On Twitter and Instagram, as well as on Facebook, there are so many metrics and indexes to analyze that it is extremely hard to evaluate the performance of a brand. That’s why Sotrender has created its own collective indexes – brand new Activity Index for Twitter and Instagram, and already well known Interactivity Index for Facebook. There is also a Relative Interactivity Index, which, measuring the number of activities on Facebook pages, also takes into account their size.

Certainly, you may ask: but why exactly are we introducing another index?

The simplest indicators of engagement seem to be the quantity and percentage of engaged users, which we also measure in Sotrender, but they’re not enough, since:

1. what is important is not only the engagement but also the character of it – Facebook likes are valued less than sharing someone’s post; we know that as well from our analyses on the commonness of certain behaviors,
2. one engaged person can be active in various ways – she can retweet one post, but also favorite it and reply to it; each of these activities counts,
3. activities of each profile are also taken into account – participating in communication, replying etc. also counts.

To meet the requirements of experts in social media marketing, that reported a need for one index that would sum up all the activities of a profile, we decided to bestow every activity with a wage. Such indexes of activities can also describe particular posts, tweets, or movies and can be used to evaluate their importance.

Activity Index for Instagram and Twitter, channels that continue to draw our attention, are the next step in our development. How did we create these indexes?

We’ve made a big database of business-related Twitter and Instagram profiles from different countries – for a couple of months we were noting all their activities and then we checked out how frequently they appear. We had also pondered about the mechanisms of various channels, and afterward we rounded off and modified the wages resulting from the frequency. In addition, for Twitter we introduced a mechanism rewarding profiles that not only post their own tweets, but also retweet and respond to their observers.

Activity Index for Instagram and Twitter in Sotrender is available under the Reach & Engagement tab, after selecting a profile.

Activity Index for Twitter

In order to summarize all the activities that occur on Twitter profiles we adopted the following weights:

• Admin’s tweet -> 8
• Admin’s retweets and replies -> 5
• Retweets -> 3
• Favorites -> 1
• Reply -> 4
• Mention -> 2

Activity Index metric in Sotrender

Activity Index for Twitter is measured for particular days of the week and hours.

Activity Index divided by weekdays

Activity Index by hour

Activity Index for Instagram

In the case of Instagram, we consider comments as an action more valuable from a brand perspective:

• Likes -> 1
• Comments -> 8

Activity Index for Instagram

Interactivity Index for Facebook

Different weights reflect different importance of various types of activities on Facebook, taking also into account how often those activities occur. For example, people are much more likely to only “like” posts than to engage in discussions with the brand or share content.

• Like -> 1
• Comment -> 4
• Text only -> 8
• Multimedia -> 12
• Share -> 16

Do you want to start analysing how your audience is interacting with you on social media? Try it out in Sotrender!