Your Social Data Archive

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Your Social Data Archive

Your Social Data Archive

We all spend a lot of time communicating with others using Social Media. In many ways this is slowly replacing many other forms of traditional communication. I had come across an interesting problem recently. One of my colleagues needed to find replies to a tweet he did in September. Just 6 month ago. It took him over an hour to scroll through the timeline on Twitter. On Facebook he couldn’t even go that far back. Many of us use Gmail. Imagine not being able to find a conversation that happened 6 months ago on Gmail.

Twitter does not offer any export facilities. The one on Facebook is quite useless. And that’s just Twitter and Facebook! How about all other platforms – YouTube, Foursquare, Digg? Imagine the pain of having to go network by network and somehow copy paste the data out to an independent storage. Yikes!

We’ve built Social Report as a social analytics platform, but have since realized a hidden feature that is so powerful that we often hear from our customers that this is the biggest reasons they are using our product.

Here is how we got there. To compute analytics we have to download all of your social data on regular basis. Not just your chats and friends, but also many other elements that provide more in-depth information about your network such as employment, education, and interests. We grab related elements such geography, videos, photos, etc, etc. All of this data is downloaded, neatly stored and subsequently processed to build reports. Reports are great but having this personal warehouse of your social data is amazingly useful. At any point in time you can export all of your data for further analysis, backup and customized reporting.

We are trying to highlight a very important issue – having a record of your social communication is a must! Just like having your emails backed up and available in case you need to go back and find a conversation, or find an attachment you sent, etc, etc. There are many reasons to seriously consider this: legal obligations, archival, creative and intellectual property rights just to name a few!

Tell us about your favorite feature – Social Style!

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RecordConfirmation.com

We’ve been looking for a way to capture customer video feedback on our Facebook page for quite some time. I found a number of free tools that allow you to simply direct your fans to their service where they can enter their responses. None of the tools offered video options. I really wanted to have something more integrated and interactive. A tool that would enable us to capture folks recording their feedback on video right on our Facebook page. Something that would be easy to setup.

I think I found a solution. Here is our feedback page – note how well it integrates in our overall Facebook page and how simple it is to record a response:

http://www.facebook.com/socialreport?sk=app_190322544333196

We’ve been able to:

  • Create an introduction message
  • Embed video recording plugin
  • Capture videos from our fans and view/download them later

Usages are endless:

  • We can now capture customer feedback.
  • We can ask questions and have folks record answers.
  • We can setup video contests!
  • We can request one off confirmations from users!

If you want to give it a try, here are the steps of how to get it setup:

  • Create a Free account at Record Confirmation (http://recordconfirmation.com)
  • Create a “Confirmation Request”. For example “Feedback”. Make sure to select “Multiple” responses – so that multiple responses to your request can be recorded.
  • Once you create it, save the link it generates.
  • Now go to your Facebook page and search for “Static HTML by Thunderpenny” app.
  • Install it – it will add a link on the left hand side – a new menu item.
  • Click on it – it will allow you to enter HTML. You will put it something like this:
    <iframe src=”the-link-that-you-generated-in-step-3?nt=1&amp;sct=0″ frameborder=”0″ scrolling=”no” width=”450px” height=”340px”></iframe>

Done! Your page fans will now able to leave you video messages! Let me know if you have any questions.

Your competitors are feeding off your ecosystem.

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Twitter Lists is not as well known or used by some folks as some other twitter features but it is an important function. It allows Twitters users to create custom groups of Twitter accounts. It is indented as publically available groups: “My favorite friends”, “Best Sports News Sources”, etc. It is something that can tell my friends about other Twitter users. In reality it is mostly used as a heavy promotional tool, with its core ability to feed off other user’s ecosystem. Let’s say you have a competitor. You have a twitter account with 10,000 followers. You are doing really well. Lots of engagement: mentions, RTs – things are going great. Your competitor on the other hand is not that known, yet he does understand that the 10,000 followers that you have is his prime target. These are the folks that have shown interest in what you do and thus will be extremely interested in what he does. Hmm, what can he do to attract this crowd effectively? He can try to follow each one of the folks that you follow. Might help some – but doubtful to have massive impact. It is quite direct too and may not result in much attention. There is something very sneaky that he can do however! He can create a Twitter List and add you to it. Seems innocent enough, but now he is tapping into your ecosystem, you and him now belong to the same group of “Best Companies in Business” or whatever name he decides to give to this list. The two names will now be mentioned in the same sentence. It will come up in the searches, etc, etc.

Dealing with this tactic is easy but does require timely reaction. You can simply block that user. That removes you from that list and removes any notion that the two entities are somehow related to one another.

This is one of the features we offer at Social Report. You can monitor your twitter lists all the time. We also send you a daily email with a list of new groups via email.

Daily Dose of Social News

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Social Report is constantly absorbing feedback and developing new ways to maintain it’s place as the leader in social media analytics. With that in mind, we have developed the Daily Digest. One of our most recent updates to our services, Daily Digest sends a summary of the user’s social media presence via email. Detailing mentions, keywords, conversations and more this is simply a great tool to make monitoring those channels and staying engaged.

The daily update can provide you or your client with updates, new followers or mentions on Twitter, new channel subscribers and comments on YouTube, new comments on your blog or Google Analytics breakdowns. For those with a busy lifestyle wishing to be able to direct their social media accounts, and analyze the information in bite size chunks, this is excellent.

I must say this has been exceptionally useful for us at Social Colleague, we have been able to deliver a consistent message across various platforms whilst juggling various client accounts. The Daily Digest has enabled us to take the relevant information and break it down, feed it back to our clients and review our services. If you are a user of Social Report for your own business this still has great value. You can cut down the time you spend analyzing your social media and profiles, messages, engagement and interaction and simply allow the information to come to you, whilst you spend the time more wisely engaging those fans and followers.

The email itself is intuitive yet simple. It’s so easy to read and use, each network has it’s own segment of the email and is communicated with exceptional ease. If you haven’t tried it yet, why not give it a go; it has saved us and our clients a huge amount of time and it can do the same for you.

Social metrics that don’t mean anything.

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We have been recently asked about adding Twitter reach and impressions to our analytics. We had all the data already so it was a no brainer – we went ahead and added it. We did however took a moment to see what these numbers actually meant as it seemed like these two measurements (reach and impressions) were widely used and accepted by many.

According to TweetReach.com – reach and impressions are defined as follows:

Simply put impressions are a total number of people that have potentially seen your message and reach is a number of unique people.

We should emphasize the “potentially” part.  Love it! Hypothetical marketing! Perhaps payments for these marketing efforts should also be hypothetical :)

Twitter feed is a drive-by. If you happen to be there when the message is passing by – you will see it. If you are not, you will never even know about it. As a matter of fact even if you try to find it later – it will take you enormous amount of time. Twitter has little in terms of historical search. It is a though twitter only wants you to see “the present”.

It seems that the premise for reach and impressions is coming from web impression measurement. Just like there are impressions in the web analytics world – these social metrics are trying to do the same. These are hardly analogous though. Web impressions are a result of one’s physical action – clicking on the link, typing the address, etc. When someone tells you that you had 1000 impressions on the web – you know what that means – 1000 actual people (give or take a few bot hits) saw your page. When you are told that you had 1000 twitter impressions – you can’t even begin to estimate what that truly means. Clearly only a fraction of these folks really saw it. How many? No one knows.

Perhaps the only way to truly figure this out is from twitter. Hopefully one day they will make Twitter Insights available to all. They certainly can tell if a tweet has been served into a user’s timeline.

All other attempts at measuring impressions and reach are completely off the mark.

 

Follow Rate – Twitter Follower and Friend Legitimacy

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You might have noticed that many Twitter users follow a lot more people than follow them back.  An immediate thought that comes to mind is: “What are these people doing?”  The answear is simple – they are exploiting Twitter user sentiment to follow people who follow them. Their thinking might be: “If I were to follow 1000 then 100 are bound to follow me back“. That might be the case, but having people follow you that are not at all interested in your subject matter will not lead to any profits and might even hinder others’ perception of your online profile.

To help you better identify and distinguish between your associations, we have assigned a Follow Rate to each Twitter user. A Follow Rate is a ratio between people that follow a person divided by the number of people this person follows. The chart below shows a few examples and their meaning of the different Follow Rates that might be assigned to a Twitter user:

Followers   Friends   Follow Rate   Conclusion
1000 100 0.1 Really good
100 1000 10 Very suspcious
1000 1000 1 OK, person probably follows every back

Follow Rate of 1+ signals that this user might be involved in spamming or crowd chasing.

We have created 2 charts (one for followers and one for friends) that will allow you to keep an eye on Follow Rate. You find them on your Twitter dashboard, in “Followers” section.

Here is an example:

 

Measuring Social Distances

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Measuring Social DistancesYou don’t necessarily need a tape measure to measure distances. It’s possible to measure the distance between two locations using sound. Sound waves travel at a predictable rate. Knowing the velocity of the sound wave, and the time lapse between the initial sound and its echo, you can determine distance to and shape of remote objects.

How is this related to Social Media?

Your social accounts are basically social spaces. Although you may think of degrees of separation as your distance to your friends and fans, in reality that calculation is in no way representative of how close you and your connections really are.  Social closeness is basically a question of how responsive your network is to what you have to say. What is the likelihood that you will get a response from your network?

Knowing this gives a holistic sense of the response you can expect from your friends, fans, connections and followers.

Let’s try this. Come up with a list of messages on different topics and send them to our channels. Let’s take few topics on sports, politics and finance. We will then measure the response (a click) for each message we send.  By the way – trying to think of response as something other than click – an impression or reach is too superfluous and will take a lot of convincing.

Our result table might look like this (expressed as % of total users, but we can also express as total clicks):

Topic Facebook Twitter Google+
Politics 76% 18% 5%
Sports 12% 4% <1%
Finance 7% <1% 9%

These categories are clearly way too general. In real world you may want to create such matrix complete with very granular subcategories (i.e. types of sports, type of political news, etc).

Few interesting conclusions based on these results:

  1. Twitter users are not interested in Finance.
  2. Google+ Users are not interested in Sports.
  3. Facebook users are really into Politics

This may seem like a fairly straight forward exercise, but without a tool that can properly conduct these field tests for us, the task can be quite daunting.

Social Report’s social publishing toolkit is quite useful here. Here is what you can do:

  1. Setup few campaigns (perhaps one for each topic).
  2. You can either create campaigns with your own content or simply take any RSS feed and use it for you content.

You can quite easily create 3 campaigns by simply using CNN’s, ESPN’s and CSPAN’s RSS feeds readily available online. Your users will now be getting your tweets and posts complete with information snippets from these channels.

What’s next?

Next is data analysis. We offer a number of dash board like visualization for you to play with. You can also simply download the data to excel too.

Here are also few useful links to tutorials
RSS Syndication and Social Content Distribution

Social Publishing – publish to your social channels like a pro

 

Adding Value to Your Social Media Presence

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Adding Value to Your Social Media Presence

Throughout my experiences on the web, I’ve seen far too many companies just go through the motions when it comes to using social media in online marketing. They heard somewhere on the internet that social media is important for online marketing, so they made a Twitter account and Facebook page for their business and figured that was that.

Well, unfortunately just having a social media presence is only the first thing you need to do in a long strategic process of making updates, corresponding with your audience, thinking of innovative ways to deliver your content through social media, and a whole host of other tweaks and considerations.

Updates are make or break

There are two ways to consider updates as you make them, and I suggest you take both considerations into account before posting any tweet or update. The first consideration is that every update should have a purpose, not for you or your company but for your audience. Before updating, think about whether your audience even has a need for the information being posted.

The second consideration is that every update should be fun or enticing. This may mean improving the titles of the content you are trying to market through social media. This also means coming up with short, concise descriptions of your content that will lure in new customers and audiences. Always seek a more attractive and exciting combination of words, but also be sure not to mislead or oversenationalize.

Make your feed a content resource

You should actively look for ways to provide more or clearer information than your competitors. Research how your competitors are using social media, and offer a better experience than their current setup. If you are providing information that would otherwise be hard to find on one site or in one feed, then you are definitely on the right track.

Interact with your audience

One of the primary functions of social media is to provide a means of communication between two entities. Yet I am surprised how few companies seem to take this principle to heart. Of course the most obvious thing you can do is respond to inquiries on your Facebook page and @mentions to your Twitter. Beyond this, you should take active steps to find out what your customers or audience want. Ask for feedback. When you have two options to deliver a certain type of content, poll through social media which delivery method they prefer. In general, updates that end with questions receive more attention and more responses than those that don’t.

Experiment for the optimal publishing time

You may have to do a little bit of testing to determine when would be the best time to post updates and content for your audience, but really just a combination of good logic and close observation should work well. Be sure to check likes, comments, @tweets, and retweets to get a decent grasp on who gets your updates when. Your most vocal audience should count for a lot as their clamor will likely help your clamor.

Experiment for the optimal social media outlet

Remember that you aren’t just limited to Facebook and Twitter. There are several specialized social networks such as Dribbble for graphic designers and then there are also other online venues to consider as well. Keep in mind that you don’t have to necessarily create an account to access certain social media outlets (although I would recommend creating an account when and where you can); for instance, I know through Twitter several different people who keep Tumblr blogs, and apparently I will ask them to share a post on their Tumblr as well as Twitter accounts.

By-line:

Mariana Ashley is a freelance writer who particularly enjoys writing about online colleges. She loves receiving reader feedback, which can be directed to mariana.ashley031@gmail.com.

Top Five Features of Social Report

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We like to talk about a lot of topics regarding social media marketing from brand audits to what a good social marketer needs to know.   Occasionally we turn the blog spotlight our way and highlight features (like the export ability) about Social Report we think are worth telling everyone about.  Today we thought we would highlight the five features of Social Report that get rave reviews and shine our blog light toward exploring the depth our solution provides.

Tracking

Having a location where you can track multiple social channels (such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter) and have access to other networks such as Yelp business reviews, Meetup, Google Analytics and more.  We also have in beta, with release slated soon, the addition of networks Foursquare, Gowalla, Bebo, Tumblr and more.  One tool to track it all.

Exporting

We have talked extensively about the power of exporting.  While most tools that track data can export, we have recently bumped up our functionality allowing you to pull from not only all the social networks you have, but your global searches, your contacts and more.  You can build your own reports, and owning your data is great.

Searches

Discovery is one of the cornerstones to solid social media marketing.  But finding influencers, people to interact with, clients and even detractors can be cumbersome.  We do unlimited global searches while others charge per search.   Even better than doing the search is the fact that these can be global searches outside of your network. And, even if you don’t choose to use this feature – Social Report still discovers conversations and indexes them for you.  Discovery is that extra mile we go for you.

Response

How do you know if your campaigns are actually working?  Measurement of course.  Social Report lets you measure how responsive your audience is.  Do they actually act?  Do they buy from you?  If you are not using Social Report – how do you track this effectively, efficiently and most importantly, accurately.  Getting all the information you need to determine ROI and help make proper adjustments as necessary is valuable.  Measure correctly, act accordingly.

Management

Any team of marketing professionals can tell you that while the end effect is of a swan gracefully maneuvering the social media waters, beneath the waves, those feet are paddling, and that requires coordination across the organization.  Social report has excellent features that let you manage team access and roles and project.  We also have White Label abilities, and our tool lets you manage that entire process with ease.  Coordination is the heart of any successful social media marketing campaign.

With all of the features and more being developed and added constantly, we feel Social Report is the only analytics solution to consider.  But again, don’t take our word for it.  Try it out for free, and explore all these features and more.