#SocialMediaStudies

APPENDIX 3 Social Media Sites

Notes on the Social Media Key Performance Indicators It was decided to obtain our KPI data from the four most significant social media sites for business: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube. For each channel, we tallied up KPIs such as: Twitter • Number of “Tweets” • Number of Followers • Average number of “Retweets” per Tweet (in 2013)

Below are brief descriptions of the Social Media sites used for gathering KPI data.

Twitter - an online social networking service and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-basedmessages of up to 140 characters, known as “tweets”. Users can forward tweets to other users, known as “retweeting”. Facebook - an online social networking service, where users may create a personal profile, connect with other users and exchange messages, including automatic notifications when they update their profile. LinkedIn - a social networking website for people in professional occupations. Users maintain a list of contact details of people with whom they have some level of relationship, called “connections”, and can also follow different companies and receive related notifications. YouTube - a video-sharing website on which users can upload, view and share videos. Users can search for video content or subscribe to another registered user’s“channel” (an individual or an organisation), which hosts all video content from that user.

Facebook • Number of “Likes”

LinkedIn • Number of Followers

YouTube • Number of Videos • Number of Subscribers • Number of Views

Overweighting of interactive accounts In order to promotemanagement companies that interact with customers on social media in the rankings, as opposed to those that merely use the sites to push messages to other users, it was decided to overweight interactive accounts.

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