Tourism Ireland is currently ranked the third largest national tourist board on Facebook, with approximately 700,000 fans across 20 markets in eight languages. In the absence of an accepted industry standard to assess the value of this beyond simply counting fan numbers, we developed the concept of Social Equivalent Advertising Value (SEAV).
Just as the PR sector has traditionally measured its impact by the cost of buying advertising to cover the equivalent column inches, so a similar approach can be applied to social media. The more a brand message is shared, the more “column inches” are gained and the value of this can be compared to the cost of equivalent online advertising.
We identified four levels of consumer engagement with brands in social media:
- Post Impressions: viewing a brand post.
- Page Impressions: viewing a brand owner’s social platform.
- Personal Actions: consuming brand content such as photos, videos or links.
- Public Actions: sharing brand content with their network.
We then categorized the actions that consumers can take across the major social platforms into each of these groupings, and attributed a financial value to the cost of delivering a comparable consumer engagement online. This allowed us to quantify the value of our social engagement in Facebook at the end of last year at an annualized level of €1.7 million.
