We often get questions about the indicators or definitions that we use in Sotrender on a daily basis – internally and externally in blog posts and in clients’ reports. We know that although some things may be obvious to us since we’re used to them, it’s not the same for everyone. This is why we’ve created the Sotrender Glossary!

Find all the definitions, explanations, and clarifications you need below.

Active Users

Active users who have interacted with the profile within a period of time. This includes liking, commenting, sharing/retweeting content, or posting on a profile for example.

You can check the number of users involved and the percentage involved for any day or hour. Additionally, you can take a look at the change over a longer period of time.

You will find out more about active users from the Community Ranking chart.

Activity Index

This is a metric used to measure activity on Twitter and Instagram. It is the equivalent of the Interactivity Index on Facebook. It summarizes all of this activity by aggregating it in one measure. Here’s how it looks for the two platforms.

Activity Index Measurement System:

For Instagram:

• Like -> 1
• Comment -> 8

For LinkedIn:

• Reaction -> 1 
• Comment -> 4
• Share -> 16

For Twitter:

In order to summarize all the activities that take place on Twitter profiles, we have adopted the following corresponding weights for scoring:

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

We assigned these weights according to the commonness of the behavior. Since more users are likely to favorite a tweet than to reply, replies have a greater value.

Affinity Index

This indicator describes the degree to which a target audience matches the entire population of an analyzed platform. At Sotrender the indicator is mostly used in Audience Scan reports. The Affinity Index shows the scale of matching the selected feature/category to the target audience against the overall Facebook population.

An Affinity Index higher than 100 means an above-average match towards the target group.

Here’s how we measure the Affinity Index:

AI = (% of interested target audience/% of interested people in the entire Facebook population) * 100

Absolute Affinity Index

What is an absolute affinity?

It’s the coactivity shown in a number of the same co-engaged users on analyzed profiles. Take a look at this example: If the value of absolute affinity or our profile and for Coca-Cola profile stands at 168, it means that those two profiles have 168 engaged people in common. These same people are active on our profile and on Coca-Cola’s profile. Our profile and the Axis one have 156 engaged users in common.

Audience Insights (Audience Groups Statistics)

This is a Facebook tool that allows you to gain additional information about three types of groups: Page fans, custom audiences, or Facebook users in general.

Audience Insights provide information about – among other things: gender, age, education, profession, frequency of activity, travel history, and country of origin.

This information can be used in several ways including verifying the communication to the group and adjust it for the demography or interests then preparing the appropriate advertising campaigns. Custom targeting of ads can help modify communication strategies for other mediums too.

Audience Scan

An in-depth study by Sotrender, from which it’s possible to thoroughly look into the specific target audience based on the customer base or Facebook fans.

The study is an extension of the option offered by Facebook (Audience Insights). The Audience Scan is much more flexible and therefore meets the needs of even the most demanding clients.

With properly selected questions, we can learn about:

• Who the influencers of the selected target group are, the brands and media sources they are interested in which are above the average benchmark

• What media are the most popular providers of information and entertainment for the target audience
• What distinguishes this target group from the entire Facebook user-base

API (Application Programming Interface)

The Application Programming Interface, to put it simply, is a specific bridge between the data source and the application/panel that they want to use.

Sotrender is connected with Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube through their respective APIs. Using this, we are able to retrieve specific information then process it and display it in a new form.

We also have our own API at Sotrender which is possible to subscribe to for companies to use the information we provide in Sotrender for their own purposes and further analysis.

Authorization

This is for controlling access to your Page information. It is particularly important because it allows the application to provide you with detailed information about the managed Page (and also makes the process much more accurate and faster). Authorization allows for “insights” such as reach, demography, negative feedback, or sources of likes that can be viewed directly on our platform.

Audience Interests

This is one of the charts in the Sotrender app which allows you to compare your profiles with tens of thousands of profiles in our database – not just those added to your account.

The User Interest Graph is a monthly ranking (i.e. you can check the values for full months only).

Benchmarking

This is the process of comparing one company, product, brand, or operating strategy with others to find better and more effective solutions. This analysis can be done against both direct competitors or other local companies as well as market leaders or more general standards for example.

Benchmarking informs you not only where in the market the company stands but which activities specifically are effective and which are less effective. It also allows you to keep track of current trends or how to stand out from the competition.

Benchmarking works well where two or more social media profiles/channels and can be analyzed and compared. What is very useful in this respect is Sotrender’s Comparison function where you can create a group on any platform to create reports about these profiles (up to 14 profiles at a time).

Community Ranking

This is a list/ranking of users who have had any interaction with a profile in a given month.

The ranking is based on the interaction with the Page and the content posted based on the Interactivity Index (InI). It also includes segments about the type of interaction performed (people who like, comment, discuss, and so on). You will be able to see the days in which the user was mostly active.

Community ranking is a monthly ranking – you can check the values only for a full month; which results in larger amounts of data being looked at for improved accuracy.

Sotrender does not store information relating to users’ names.

Dark Posts (Unpublished Page Posts)

These are posts that don’t appear on the timelines of Pages on Facebook. Dark posts, formerly called unpublished Page posts, are used to create ads and most often appear to users in their newsfeeds or the right columns on Facebook when the promotion of such posts is active.

Because they’re exclusively commercial, dark posts show only paid reach.

Engagement

User engagement is one of the most important indicators for evaluating the quality of a brand’s communication strategy on social media. Engagement describes how brands are able to incite users’ responses. Through this, brands not only keep on engaging their fans but also their image on the web.

The Facebook Algorithm (Formerly Edge Rank)

The Facebook algorithm is responsible for displaying the content on the users’ feeds, evaluating whether it would be interesting for the user. This algorithm affects the reach of every post.

Many factors matter when it comes to the algorithm. Some of the most important variables are Affinity – the person with the given Page, the weight of the post which is calculated using the number of activities performed on it, and time decay which is affected by the time since the publication of the post.

Facebook Insights

These are Facebook statistics that give Page administrators in-depth information about their Pages. They can help track user behavior with published posts, find answers to questions such as “when is the best time of the week/day to post?” and “what kinds of posts are my most popular?”. This can help increase the efficiency and interaction of posts with the user base.

Frequency

Frequency is the average number of times an ad has been displayed on the feed of a user. It is counted as the number of impressions divided by the total reach.

When setting up Facebook ads, you can determine how many times a given ad is shown to a user which would of course be dependent on the budget of the campaign.

Interactivity Index (InI)

This is a Facebook activity indicator (created by Sotrender). InI calculates the individual activities and assigns them the appropriate weights according to their relevance to the Page. This allows the InI to help identify which content was the most engaging, considering the importance of individual activities. The metric can be calculated from the brand’s perspective or that of the user’s.

How do we count InI?

• Likes = 1
• Comment = 4
• Post (text, status or multimedia, etc.) = 12
• Shares = 16

Median

This is a very short description of the middle value of a given dataset. In many cases, in the quantitative studies conducted by Sotrender, the use of the median is more justified than the use of the average since it’s more resistant to extreme values in a given dataset.

People Talking About This (PTAT)/Storytellers

People Talking About This shows a wide range of users around the Page. It takes into account people who have liked the site, posted on the Page, reacted to posts, commented, or shared as well as responding to event invitations as well as a few other actions.

PTAT is the only metric that, without access to insight data, assesses the impact of advertising activities. This is because this includes Dark Posts which is content that only appears to users to whom it was targeting.

Total Reach

Reach is the number of pageviews and content views in a given time period regardless of whether the person saw the content or interacted with it.

This includes both paid and organic reach.

Organic reach

This is the number of pageviews and its content with no additional promotional activities.

Paid reach

This is the number of page impressions and its content that are the result of paid promotional activities (ads).

Viral reach

This is the number of pageviews and their content that are the result of other users’ activities. Viral reach information is available only from the Sotrender panel and not in Facebook statistics tools.

Relative Affinity Index

What is relative affinity?

Relative affinity index is reflected in percentage:

In the previous example, our selected profile and the Coca-Cola profile have a relative affinity index of 0,01%, meaning that 0,01% of all engaged users on the Coca-Cola profile are engaged on our profile as well. In Sotrender you will find users’ co-activities divided into two sections: profiles and industries.

Relative Interactivity Index

This is an index created on the basis of the Interactivity Index but it takes the size of the Page into account. Therefore, it allows you to get a more accurate comparison of different Pages.

Relative interactivity index = (InI/# of fans) * 100

Response Rate

A metric indicating how often a page responds to users’ posts within a certain time period and shown in % points as well. The response rate doesn’t include measurements of responses to users’ comments but only to posts.

Share of Spending

This is another Sotrender indicator used in the Paid Communication Study. It reports advertising expenditures across the entire industry – including the months when spending is the highest.

Share of Voice

This is also Sotrender’s own indicator of how “loud” the brand was with respect to its competitors. This indicator is based on views and can convey the following information:

• What are the different methods of communication with the target audience?

• Who is the leading competitor in the market?

In turn, Facebook’s Share of Voice shows which brands have irregular bigger campaigns or smaller more regular posting strategies.

Social Inbox

Social inbox (AKA moderation) is the managing of and responding to discussions on your social media page. This includes responding to and addressing user’s comments and concerns on your page, posts, or ads. Facebook moderation includes replying to, muting, deleting, or hiding comments in a thread. Check out Sotrender’s social inbox feature so you can save time and manage your conversations with fans more efficiently.

Target Group/Target Audience

These are people or entities (such as companies or institutions) who, because of certain characteristics/preferences, are potential customers of the company/brand. These are the people to whom marketing and sales activities will be targeted.

Getting to know your target audience is a constant process because as people’s preferences change, the messages that are addressed to them must also be changed.

One way to better understand the target audience is to conduct an Audience Scan.

Trends Reports

Trends reports are the largest monthly and free publications summarizing the results of UK pages and channels on Facebook and Twitter. The reports include in-depth demographics, reach, fan engagement, activity statistics. Currently, they cover less than 80 Facebook thematic categories and around 40 for the remaining platforms. The latest editions of the reports can be found on our website under the Reports tab. Trends reports for the UK have been discontinued since August 2017.

Congratulations! You’ve just made it to the end of our glossary! Are there any other terms that you’re not familiar with? Let us know and we’ll add it there!