Socialbakers bakes its data analytics down to a Social Health Index

Can social media analytics be compressed into an elevator pitch?

That was a question Lenovo asked its social analytics firm, Socialbakers. The result, launching today, is a Social Health Index that presents a few top-level indicators of a brand’s standing in social media vis-a-vis any competitors.

“When you’re with a VP, you have to [quickly] give them a very clear idea of where we stand,” Lenovo’s director of the Digital and Social Center of Excellence Rod Strother told us. Given that need, Lenovo then provided input to Socialbakers for developing the Index.

It offers a single top-level number on a 100-point scale, as well as single numbers representing the client’s — or a competitor’s — social health on Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube. Other platforms will be added at some point, the social analytics firm said.

Additionally, an area graph visually depicts the four groups of data that go into the scores — participation, follower/fan/subscriber acquisition and retention, and shareability.

“We find it’s difficult for clients to comprehend all” the statistics in ordinary social analytics reports, Socialbakers’ CEO and co-founder Jan Rezab told VentureBeat.

“It’s very, very complicated,” he said, noting that his firm tracks over 180 metrics for social media.

Strother told us the Social Health Index confirmed for Lenovo that it was “where we think we are” in some dimensions. It also “uncovered some areas” against competitors where the China-based company thought it was behind competitors but wasn’t — or vice versa.

A Socialbakers’ client can drill down to the constituent real-time data through the Executive Dashboard, where the Index resides. Rezab said the data employed to calculate the Index includes most, but not all, of the available 180+ metrics. He added that the mix of data might be tweaked as the Index is tested or that a specific client company might want to reshift the mix in favor of some kinds of data.

But companies live on sales, not social media stats, so both companies said they were looking forward to matching the Index’ underlying data with information relating to e-commerce purchases, to get a better sense of return-on-investment.

This Index follows the introduction of distilled scores from several content analytics companies, such as Conductor’s Content Health Score, Uberflip’s Content Score, and BrightEdge’s content SEO score.

There is no shortage of companies offering social media analytics. How does this Index compare to the competition?

“There’s no other company that is bringing [this kind of] a good cockpit view,” Rezab told us.

The index, he said, could help Socialbakers become “a Nielsen of social media” — a Holy Grail for many social analytics firms.

The nearly six-year-old Socialbakers, based in Prague, bought the Chicago-based startup EdgeRank Checker this past summer, giving it a boost in analyzing Facebook newsfeeds. In February, it closed on a $26 million third round of funding.