Social Metrics For Interactive Agencies

There are few who are social marketers that actually love analytics. Likewise there are few who write marketing copy, status updates or builds communities using social networks that love statistics. We are social people who like being social. That’s what makes us good at social media. Social media professionals are far more expressive than analytical. However, our job as professionals demands that we be analytical as well.

Objectives & goals set us apart as professionals

The thing that separates us from the non-professionals is that we have objectives and goals and are held accountable for creating demonstrable results. We need an easy to use tool to help us to justify our time and marketing direction to our clients. We need a tool that helps us to course correct. It’s necessary to move towards our goals and objectives. SocialReport focused on finding solutions to reporting and analytics problems and helping people to succeed with their social marketing campaigns. We need a powerful but easy to use tool set to measure and monitor our online activity.

Social media is social. It’s about people. It’s about getting others to see a little bit of themselves in us. It’s about being friends. It’s about creating a community. It’s about converting followers into fans of our brand, product or service. It’s about being genuine and authentic. It’s a people business and as people, the majority of us are driven more by emotion than actual facts. Every good sales person knows this. How people feel about our brand is critical.

I can back this up by discussing more complex concepts such as cognitive linguistics, ambient awareness, managing and understanding different the types of personalities, individual communication strategies and behavioral science.

In the end, most of the time, people don’t know why they respond to things or what they are actually revealing through their responses. The truth is, it doesn’t really matter either. I just need to know how to create the right stimulus that people will respond to and how to create the right emotional attachments to the brand. I also want to write in a way that allows people to create mental anchors to the brand. But first, I have to give them a reason to listen and to care. That starts with me. I have to care first and I must be genuine about it.

Social media isn’t a megaphone

One-way marketing messages do not and will not work in “social” media. Conversation does. The only way to get around this, is to have an already established brand that has been running a successful traditional marketing campaign for a long number of years or a news service and even for many of those brands, they are successful in the social media space because they are responsive and conversational. There are a massive number of case studies to support this.

af•fin•i•ty [uh-fin-i-tee] noun

1. a natural liking for or attraction to a person, thing, idea, etc.

2. a person, thing, idea, etc., for which such a natural liking or attraction is felt.

3. relationship by marriage or by ties other than those of blood (distinguished from consanguinity).

4. inherent likeness or agreement; close resemblance or connection

In the end, social is a two-way and not a one-way communications device. Increasing engagement is directly proportional to increasing stimulus. What I am looking for is intensity of feeling towards the brand and increasing the intensity of conversation around the brand.

Be a good host

In many ways, services such as Twitter are like a talk show. We need to relate with our audience. That means breaking the fourth wall. Talking at people instead of talking with people is not social. It’s not networking. It’s advertising. Advertising is also good but that’s not the purpose of a Twitter account or even a Facebook page. They are PR tools and I’m acting as a spokesperson. I’m not giving a speech. I’m participating in a conversation around my brand and with my community.

Think about going to a party and not listening or responding to conversation. Imagine going to a party and just talking and talking and talking… Not a two-way dialog but just talking at people. Twitter and Facebook are the same way. My job is to gather a crowd. That means being witty, funny, engaging and interesting. It does not mean making pitch after pitch. That approach doesn’t work in real life. It doesn’t work online.

Try SocialReport for free for thirty days and see what the data tells you about your social media campaigns.

Imagine if you had to read every single message from every follower you had on Twitter, every Facebook post, every forum posting on LinkedIn, every single video about your industry on YouTube. There wouldn’t be time left over in the day to eat much less, do your job and do it successfully.

Now think about if you had to do that for six or seven of your clients if you are an Ad Agency or Interactive Agency?

Easily find all the relevant data and chatter across your social media channels; organized it, search it, track it, learn from it.

MUsing the index that is provided by SocialReport.com users can access their discovery dashboard and view social messages, grouped and categorized by geography, language, people, product, company, topic and more. Instead of getting overwhelmed at the immense amount of data, all you have to do is check up on topic of interest and find all conversations that took place around it.

Indexes can be searched by these categories and more:

–City
–Company
–Country
–Holiday
–Entertainment, Award or Event
–Market Index
–Medical Condition
–Medical Treatment
–Movie

You can then click on the words represented and see all the related conversations around that topic. The wealth of information you are given lets you plan strategies, gather information and get campaigns organized and have all the identities and content of key players at your finger-tips. What POWER!

For instance, let’s say you are interested in social media and it’s related conversations. Click on the word “social media” and all the conversations on that topic appear.

To gain more information, just click on the user icon/name and that will take you to that user profile on a given network.

If you click on the message itself, Social Report will direct you to the actual message posting.

And the great thing is it shows messages from all of your networks. No need to flip between different social entities to get your information.

The best part of all of this for advertising and interactive media agencies? The effort to create or maintain this index is minimal. Once you have added your accounts to your Social Report dashboard, the tool will do all the work for you. Social Report will download and analyze all of your social chatter for you.

Want to try SocialReport for Free? Register now and get to see all the deep and thorough features for FREE for 30 days.