From the Mind of Innovation: Unveiling the Areto Score with Our Head of Product
Head of Product, Lauren Briske
Meet the brains (and math!) behind Areto Score, and get her insights about brand health, why traditional metrics weren’t cutting it for Areto users, and what’s in store for the future.
We sat down with Lauren Briske, Areto's head of product and the mastermind behind the Areto Score. With a deep understanding of community engagement, Lauren is passionate about measuring true value. Join us as she dives into the fascinating story of the Areto Score's creation, from its inception to its development process, and reveals why it truly matters for your social media success. Discover how this innovative metric can empower you to understand your audience like never before and craft content that resonates deep within your community.
Are you ready to ditch the old metrics and embrace a new era of meaningful engagement? Let's delve into the world of the Areto Score!
Can you provide a brief overview of what the Areto Score is and its primary purpose within Areto’s software?
The Areto Score measures the health of social media accounts, posts and campaigns based on engagement quality. It ranges from 0 to 100, where a score of 0 is extremely unhealthy while 100 is extremely healthy.
So far we’ve seen posts in the low 20s and 30s, especially before moderation, and we’ve seen posts scores in the high 80s and 90s.
How does Areto Score work?
Essentially, the Areto Score cuts through the noise of traditional engagement metrics and sentiment analysis on social media accounts and posts. It delineates between authentic, positive, neutral and non-harmful negative comments, along with likes, shares and saves—the markers of a healthy community and successful content–and less desirable types of engagement like toxic negative sentiments, abuse, trolling behaviour and spam.
By consolidating all sorts of different interactions into a single score, the Areto Score gives you a comprehensive understanding of how your content truly resonates with your audience.
What inspired the development of the Areto Score, and what specific problem or need does it address?
There are two main things that inspired us. First, we heard from users that they find it hard to easily distinguish between high quality engagement on a post versus low quality. A post or campaign may have a high engagement score, but if that engagement is mostly spam or fans complaining, attacking one another or engaging in other exclusionary behaviour, they don't have a way to understand those nuances with current tools and traditional metrics. Our users asked us if we could create a more accurate and usable indicator of content and community health that takes into account bad engagement, comment sentiment and other positive behaviours - likes and shares, that sort of thing.
The other source of inspiration for us was the evaluation of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) campaigns and posts, such as those celebrating events like Pride Month. Traditional sentiment tools tend to assign negative scores to campaigns when fans actively support causes and counteract trolls. However, these scores fail to accurately depict the community's health or the campaign's resonance. Our users expressed the need to prevent vocal minorities from skewing results, and overshadowing the genuine sentiment and success of a campaign.
How was the Areto Score developed? And can you share insights into the development process and any challenges along the way?
Areto Score development involved lots of testing across various post types, including positive, negative and neutral content, as well as DEI event posts and non-DEI event posts, all spanning different sports, account sizes and seasons. The team did a lot of experimentation with different data analysis approaches to create a system capable of ranking and scoring posts based on an account’s prior engagement levels, too.
And challenges?
Sentiment scoring is always a big challenge, but thankfully we have great sentiment analysis, so we were able to differentiate between positive sentiment that can seem negative and negative sentiment that can seem positive.
So the biggest challenge we faced was being able to create a score that could scale across different account sizes. Since larger accounts tend to have higher volumes of engagement, we really wanted a comparable score based on each community’s typical rates of engagement.
What are the key features and functionalities of the Areto Score?
It’s a single score–that’s the beauty of it!—a whole number that can be used to score and compare the health of different posts, campaigns and accounts. The key feature is that the Areto Score can differentiate between different engagement types - high-quality engagement and bad or brand-damaging engagement. The score tells you what content and topics your community likes and what it doesn’t, and shows you the overall health of your community over time.
How does the Areto Score integrate with existing features in our software?
Areto Score works best when it works together with auto-moderation. We can see what a piece of content or campaign’s Areto Score is before content is auto-moderated and after it’s auto-moderated, and that helps our users see the impact of different topics and content on their community.
How do you expect the Areto Score to impact Areto users? What benefits will they see?
Areto Score will really streamline decision-making for social media teams and sponsors to quickly assess the performance of their content and compare it to previous campaigns as well. Having a single health score on a post, one that takes away the noise and evaluates high-quality engagement versus the bad engagement will make a huge impact.
Has there been any user feedback or testing sessions for the Areto Score? If so, what were the results?
Yes! We’ve tested Areto Score with a handful of our users. One of them doesn't use sentiment analysis tools. With Areto Score they can now see what content is resonating most positively with their fans, especially on content that doesn't talk about wins. They’re pretty excited about using the Score to see what posts are resonating for generating content in the future.
On the flipside, we have another user who’s super focused on seeing what their lowest-performing posts are and what’s driving those trends: Are followers upset over a loss? Or is there something going on that might be relevant to their content or brand strategy? Because we show the Areto Score before and after moderation, this user found it helpful to see the impact of automatically removing unhealthy engagement on their own community health.
Speaking of impact, what impacts Areto Score the most?
A couple of different things.
The first is if a post is cluttered with spam. If you’re not moderating spam or illegal streams, as a sports property that can be the majority of your user-generated content. And fans tend to shy away from commenting when there’s lots of spam. So getting rid of that increases your Areto Score. Trolling behaviour is the same: if there are a few active trolls consistently posting negative comments on your content, and you reduce the visibility of that troll, you pave the way for more healthy engagement–and a higher score!
Second, how your content is performing in terms of likes and shares–those traditional engagement metrics –also impact the Score. When your good engagement goes up, your brand health score does too. And if no one likes your post? Your Areto Score will reflect that.
Are there plans for future updates or enhancements to the Areto Score? Can you provide a roadmap for its future development?
We’ve heard from our users that they want to see even more scoring on their top and bottom-performing posts to get a clearer picture of what content resonates and doesn’t, what’s causing flare-ups if there’s a situation that needs to be escalated or damaging backlash towards a player or team or initiative.
We can pick out trolls and super fans as part of the Areto Score, and that’s something we’re incorporating into future updates. With super fans, we’re able to pull out your top fans on your top-performing posts, meaning teams can recognize and reward them with promotions or boost their comments. For trolls, we can pick them out and share a report to escalate to the platforms or law enforcement.
How do you envision the Areto Score evolving over time to meet changing user needs and industry trends?
There’s so much potential for the Areto Score in the future! For starters, having a single metric that tells the whole story about your brand and content health, users will start to see trends and be able to use their Areto Score to better plan brand campaigns and fan engagement strategies.
We know our users struggle with benchmarking campaign performance against competitors, so over time the more data we can collect the better brand and content health benchmarking we can offer each industry.
Areto Score will also be used to bring in more sponsorship revenue for our users, because they’ll be able to show how well campaigns perform, encouraging sponsors to get involved.
The evolution I’m most excited about though is that Areto Score will be able to predict how a piece of content or a campaign will perform for a specific audience and platform, and then make recommendations to improve it, customized to your fanbase.
Know your score!
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