Tag Archives: how-to measure social media

The Power of Exporting Your Data

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One of the unique problems about analyzing social media is having so many different networks, each with it’s own standards of measurement and analytics data. Compiling that data in a format that allows you to examine information apples to apples, have the ability to look at trends and then have that data be exportable is a social media strategists dream come true.

All The Data In One Place

Getting together reports on social data can be a multi-hour, sometimes multi-day affair.  Aligning dates, times, data points and then capturing the data out of each individual social network can be cumbersome at best, nightmarish at worst.

Then consider if you have to pull that data from a month ago?  A year ago?  What about if you have to compare or cross-reference your data from networks with other data – perhaps sales or accounting information? Even from a legal perspective or company need, if you need to pull tweets from Twitter or messages from Facebook and other networks to see what was said about or by you – could that be done?

Social Report Brings Export to the Social Media Analytics Game

We are proud of this feature.  We spent quite a bit of time getting it right and wanted to tout the features a bit. The Social Report Export feature allows:

  • Exporting from many social networks including: Twitter, Facebook, WordPress, Yelp, Meetup, Myspace, YouTube, Google Analytics and more.
  • Exporting discovery (i.e. Keyword search results)
  • Exporting contacts from the Address Book
  • Exporting campaigns results
  • Customizing dates to meet the end-user’s needs

Of course, if you are using Social Report already and want to learn more we have an a “how to” post on exporting from within the tool.  If you have not yet signed up for Social Report, here is the easy registration page or if you want more information, sign-up for our next Webinar!

The ability to pull the social media data from so many sources for dates custom set by the user and include the discovery information gives any social media marketing professional or strategist the power to see the big picture and even better the knowledge to act on it.

Brand Audit Best Practices

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Social chatter and noise can be very distracting when you try and measure what is being said about your company, key industry concepts and your site.   And as we all know the social networks are ever changing. We think conducting a brand audit is a good first step and a key elements of a successful social media monitoring campaign.

 

Brand Audit As A Baseline

 

Having an analytical baseline is a good starting point.  Some key points to look at when doing the brand audit are:

– Volume of Conversations
– Sentiment & Tone of Conversations
– Brand Attacks
– Customer Service Issues
– “Attaboys”
– Influencers
– Locations
– Sources

After getting all the data you find relevant, map it out.  Social Report will even let you export the data to make it easier.  Even if you have to use Excel to map it out, know what is being said, by whom and how often.

 

What Opportunities Are Present

 

With the right data, organized correctly any social media professional can look for the opportunities that the social graph is showing you.  Expediency in getting data and feedback is a key element of social media marketing, so watching frequently for social trends is crucial.  A few opportunities to monitor, advance and in some cases save your brand can include:

– customer service slip-ups
– confusion about your product
– brand attacks by competitors
– employee PR issues
– press that is praising your brand

Remember though, this audit can’t tell you everything.  Think of the brand audit as a global thermometer to gage the what, the who and the where of social conversations.  Knowing what the outcomes are versus what the expected outcomes are, is the first step to getting any social media marketing strategy on track.  Social media is no magic bullet but it can make the difference in many company’s bottom line with the right data.

Social media isn’t a speech; it’s a conversation

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Social media isn’t a speech; it’s a conversation. It’s relationship-based selling unless one already has established their brand through traditional marketing. A big part of having a social media presence is being present and participating in an ongoing dialog with our audience.

 

Investigate

 

What do people want? What are their needs? In the case of SocialReport is it really monitoring and metrics? Not really. It’s higher engagement and increased affinity for the brand. Monitoring, analyzing, and metrics are a tool and a means to an end. It’s how we as marketers know if what we are doing is working. Do more of what does work and less of what doesn’t work. The only way to make incremental adjustments to our messages is to track and analyze. The real problem that requires a solution is increasing actions taken on what we post and ultimatelysales conversion and/or click-throughs (in the case of a blog property).

 

How do we increase actions taken on our status updates?

 

It’s not through one-way marketing messages. Nobody likes to be sold. Everyone likes to buy. Don’t post about the features of your product or service, post about the benefits. How can I help people? What problems can I help them to solve? What can I do for my audience. How can I make it about them and not about me?  Social media is unique in that it is a two-way communications device. Twitter and Facebookand just about every other social site’s primary functionality is as a conversational tool. (Ads and other features are secondary to the ability for people to communicate messages to oneanother.) Think about this for a moment. What do we call these groups of services? Social networking? Social media? What is it that we do? Social marketing.

 

so•cial [soh-shuh l] adjective

1. pertaining to, devoted to, or characterized by friendly companionship or relations: a social club.
2. seeking or enjoying the companionship of others; friendly; sociable; gregarious.
3. of, pertaining to, connected with, or suited to polite or fashionable society: a social event.
4. living or disposed to live in companionship with others or in a community, rather than inisolation: People are social beings.
5. of or pertaining to human society, especially as a body divided into classes according to status: social rank.

 

We use words like “social” and “community” for a reason. The online services that we use arecalled social networking services for a reason. These are not one-way communication devicesintended for marketing messages. What we are trying to accomplish is to convert followersinto actual fans and promote affinity for our brand. To borrow from Liz Strauss, we have to give people a reason to care. I find myself constantly asking the question, “Why should people care?” A lot of social media is Sales & Marketing 101: It’s not about me, it’s about them. It’s always about “them” in social media.

 

Increasing Engagement

 

The solution to increasing engagement across social networks is to be social; to engage and to interact. To provide status updates that are personally relevant and useful to both Twitter andFacebook audiences. (And most other social networking sites.) Bombarding social propertieswith marketing messages does not work. Direct selling and waging an ad campaign on a Twitter page or a Facebook page does not work. If I identify and solve a problem for people, that will work.
 
Again using SocialReport as an example; the challenge that SocialReport’s audience has is, “How do I increase my engagement, drive actions based on my status updates, increase my reach,increase my number of impressions, and increase the volume and intensity of conversationaround my brand? How do I get my brand to stick in the mind’s of my readers?” Those are the problems that need to be solved. The ancillary problem is, how do I measure if I’m solving those problems? That’s where Social Report comes in.

4 Steps to Instant Social Network Omnipotence

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Social Report is committed to continually adding features that will make social reporting and curating your social media efforts easier. With Social Report, you can now have a daily summary of all  your social events delivered to you encapsulated in an email. The benefit to you is that you can now access this data very simply and easily right on your smart phone.

MHow many times have we had something important to say while travelling, weren’t necessarily able to open our laptop and post status updates from our smart phone? Shouldn’t we be able to access our social reporting from the same device? With a few clicks of your mouse, you can activate a daily event summary email in your Social Report account. Your daily email notification will bring together all the relevant events across your social channels: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Vimeo, LinkedIn, Yelp, WordPress, Digg, Bebo, Google Analytics, Foursquare and more. That’s a pretty exciting and powerful tool. Again, as simple to access as checking your email. You can scope out new followers and mentions on Twitter, new comments on your blogs, views of your videos on YouTube, web site activity analysis and much more.

 

The Daily Alert is Your Social Heart Beat

 

Quickly look at it on your mobile phone or a tablet to gain an immediate understanding of what’s happening in your or your customer’s world. You are in control. You are empowered. You have your finger on the pulse of your social activity.

MMore importantly, you can give answers on the fly when your client or boss calls to ask you how the conference is going and if you are gaining traction while away. You’ll know because you are up to date. (And BlogWorld Los Angeles is just around the corner.)

MScrolling through the daily event summary is efficient and the information you want is easily identifiable. Instead of spending an hour collecting this information daily by going into each and every network trying to figure out what’s new, quickly glancing through the daily summary report will give you an instant cognition of your social activity.  Events are organized in a simple and intuitive listing. Each social account is presented with a network specific section. You can also forward this email to others, like your customers. MHow easy is it to activate the Daily Social Report? 3 mouse clicks and 30 seconds of your time.

1. Login to Social Report.

2. In the left hand sidebar is the Settings widget, all the way at the bottom. Click that.

3. When the menu opens, click Notifications at the bottom of the list.

4. What you want is the Daily Digest, click Save and you are done.   M

The daily notification email will now provide you with a detailed summary of all events across your social channels for the previous day.   Try SocialReport for free for thirty days and see what the data tells you about your social media campaigns.