Are your efforts effective?
That's a tough question for any business, and especially tough in public relations.
Say you have 1,000 followers on Twitter and 4,000 fans on Facebook. OK, great. What does that mean?
A study by Solve Media highlights this problem. There's a lot better data regarding banner ads on the web, which can get tracked far better than public relations efforts.
Banner ads are everywhere. How often do they get clicked? Far less than you think.
Solve Media says you are more likely to get into Harvard, graduate from Navy SEAL training and climb Mount Everest than you are to actually click on a banner ad.
Dan Zarrella has thought about this and crunched the numbers for non-advertising content.
Zarrella used the science of contagious diseases to create a model of how much exposure you need to generate results.
Here's his formula and an example.
Say you have 10,000 followers, fans and readers. Call that variable F.
Let's say you send a message to all 10,000 of them, via Twitter, Facebook, email or whatever means. He calls that variable Exposure and gives it an E.
For the sake of this example, he assumes that 100 percent of his audience actually get his message.
How many actually read the message? That variable is Attention and gets labeled A, and he uses the ballpark figure of 1 percent, which is an educated guess he's making based on previous studies with retweets and shares.
So one percent of the 10,000 people in your audience of F will actually read the piece. That's 100 people.
How many will read the piece and actually be Motivated to do something? That variable is labeled M, and Zarrella pegs the rough percentage as 1 percent.
This seems about right to me. I'd like to see hard data on how often people reply. I bet the response rate is much, much higher when you try to enter a dialogue with people on Twitter, Facebook, your blog or email than when you simply put messages into the world.
Would this formula work for mass media?
Roughly, yes. Exactly, no.
Roughly yes because the math doesn't change. A story on the front page of your local newspaper with a circulation of 30,000 people will probably get seen by all 30,000 people, so you'd have the same 100 percent exposure.
Not exactly because a front-page story is a lot more likely to get read, and talked about, than a Tweet or a Facebook post, and the odds go down the deeper you get into the newspaper. Page B6 is often where stories go to die.
TV and radio are different.
Rather than picking whichever story you want to read, you hear and see whatever the station is playing. Instead of a 100-percent change of being exposed to the story and a 1 percent or 10 percent chance you'll read it, there's a 100 percent chance with radio and TV that you'll experience the story. Well, unless you're madly changing channels.
Twitter, Facebook and other social media are also more temporary than mass media. Tweets fly by in real time. Facebook posts are slower. Newspapers are easier to catch. They just sit there, unless there's a strong wind or a spouse sneaking around trying to steal the crosswords.
I'd like to see the science on what percentage of Tweets and Facebook posts that the average user actually sees. I bet it's close to 1 percent. There's so much content flying by, and unless you stay awake 24 hours a day, glued to the screen, it's impossible to catch it all.
To a public relations pro, the takeaway from this is to always look for big numbers.
How can I reach the maximum number of eyeballs and ears per hour?
Social media is trendy, and it can be effective. But you could invest all of your time and energy in it, building up a list of 10,000 fans and followers, when a more effective strategy would be to get on radio stations with 100,000 listeners and newspapers with circulations of 250,000 per day.
I'm not saying you have to pick. It's not an either-or choice. Put a gun to my head, though, and I'd still pour most of my resources in mass media -- because the odds are much better with an audience of 350,000 versus an audience of 10,000.