Individual Technology Exploration: Social Media Analytics

If you’ve ever ran a social media account for an organization, you know that in the behind-the-scenes there are all these numbers to help you know which posts are more popular than others. These are the social media analytics of that account. Buffer defines “social media analytics as the gathering of data from social media platforms to help inform us and guide our marketing strategy.”

Analytics can tell you many different things, and according to Business News Daily you have to know what metrics you are looking for to know if you are reaching your goals. In your social media strategy, you should make these clear, and then find which metrics go along with the objectives to know if you are meeting them.

Here are some native analytics tools you can start incorporating into your business.

Facebook Insights

An example of what your insights page might look like in the overview.
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If you have a business page on Facebook, you can see your page insights. These insights can tell you how your page is doing with its overall activity like visits, actions, audience and clicks. It also includes graphics to help you visual the information.

As well as an overall view, you can also see post by post analytics. I really like this section because it shows you your posts in a list with the date, time, type, target, reach, engagement and an area to promote. If you see a post not doing as well as you’d like, you have the option to boost it to get more impressions.

Viewing on a desktop or laptop you can see a bigger scope and even graphs that Facebook provides for you. On the Facebook app they recently added a “Pages” tab at the bottom, so you can view all of the pages you monitor more easily.

These are the images Facebook for Business gives you on their page as examples.
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Instagram Insights

Instagram also uses insights for only business accounts. I have found that this native analytics tool is my least favorite for an overview, but my favorite for individual posts. When you go to your insights, you can see three tabs: Content, Activity and Audience. Under Content you can see an overview of your page for the last seven days. You can see posts which you can organize by a lot of different analytical metrics and up to two years ago. The next category is stories which you can only see the past 14 days, but you can organize by metric here too. The last section on Content are your promotions.

Under activity you will see more analytical metrics, but only for seven days’ time. I wish they would add the option to increase the period of time shown.

The last tab is for your audience. This page shows Growth, Top Locations, Age Range, Gender and Followers. I think the followers section is the most valuable here because you can see when you should post based on when your followers are online.

An example of Instagram Profile Insights.
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Twitter Analytics

Unlike Facebook Insights and Instagram Insights, Twitter Analytics can be applied to any account. On the Twitter Analytics Home tab, you can see a summary of how your page is doing. It also breaks up your months into sections to see what was most successful for your page. It includes highlights of your Top Tweet, Top mention, Top Follower, and Top media Tweet.

When viewing your Tweet activity, you can see a graph with all of your impressions to see when you had the most activity. This tab gives you metrics on your impressions, engagements, and engagement rate. You can also see likes, retweets, link clicks and replies.

The next tab available is to view your audience analytics. This area is a lot more detailed and has more categories than Facebook by far.

*These two Images are screenshots of the overview of “All Twitter users” under my audience analysis.*

Besides these native analytic tools there are a bunch of companies that can also provide analytics tools, but most of them require payment to use. Some of these companies include Hootsuite, Sprout Social, Google Analytics, Hubspot, Buffer and more.

In order to grow your social media presence, you need to look into your analytics to really know what your audience wants. After knowing your analytics, you won’t be questioning how your content is performing anymore because you will know exactly what your audience likes, and what they don’t.

Team Book Review: Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook

Content creation for social media seems simple and easy, and sometimes it can be, but it is usually a bit more complex and requires a good bit of thought. Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook by Gary Vaynerchuk explains how to optimize your social media presence and includes great examples of content. Even though the book is a bit dated compared to where social media stands now, it still provides great insight and can help you improve your organization’s social media.

If you haven’t read the book, you are probably thinking “What the heck does ‘jab’ and ‘right hook’ mean?” A jab is the content you put out that doesn’t sell anything or is a subtle way to promote your company. Jabs don’t necessarily have to do anything with the company, but they need to be relatable and well-liked topics. A right hook is the content that has a call to action and provokes you to do or buy something. In general, you want to use more jabs than right hooks.

Gary really focuses on the use of native content on social media which I think is very important. These are usually more often jabs than right hooks. Native content, which I hadn’t heard of before, is content that blends in with the person’s timeline or stream of content. If it is done correctly, the person looking at the post (or ad) shouldn’t realize it’s coming from a company until they look at the handle or page name.

One of my favorite things about this book is the fact that Gary added so many examples. He wanted to make sure that people know what bad, good, and great content looks like. When given a bad example, he would list what he likes about it, what he doesn’t like, and how he would change it. Sometimes he would even redesign it and put the new post in the book as well. Not only did he give content examples from real life companies, but he had chapters specially for the big platforms at the time. This helped you know the right way to make content specific to each platform.

If I had to rate this book, I would give it 4.5 stars out of 5. The content is great, but I believe some of the points could have been summed up a bit more. I really like that you could see Gary’s personality through his writing. He is a very straight forward, tell you how it is kind of guy. The way he wrote the book made you enjoy what you were reading. The only big problem I saw while reading this book was the outdated information. He included sections talking about Vine and Google+. These sections talked about the fact that they were new, and what we might expect from them. The book also included a whole chapter on Tumblr, but nowadays Tumblr is not as widely used. Also, there were only small sections on LinkedIn and Snapchat because they weren’t as popular yet. Now LinkedIn and Snapchat are major platforms used by a lot of different people.

I would really like an updated version of Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook. Gary provides great insight and I learned a lot of information from his book. Overall it is a great tool for creating content and knowing how to make your content be appreciated by a larger number of people. I will keep this book and refer to it when I need some guidance when running a social media account.

Digital Influencer Danielle Carolan

Whenever I think of the typical digital influencer I think of Danielle Carolan. Danielle is a Junior at the University of Georgia earning a Fashion Merchandising degree and is a member of Kappa Delta Sorority. She has a YouTube channel, podcast, Instagram, and Twitter. Danielle is originally from Tampa, Florida and started YouTube in 2011 at the age of 12. “Gals on the Go,” the podcast she cohosts with fellow influencer, Brooke Miccio, was created a little over a year ago. On YouTube she has 562K followers and on Instagram she has 251K followers.

Her YouTube videos have stayed similar over the years, but the content is a bit different. The main differences now are that she does more vlogs and less sit-down videos and the content is more mature. She does a lot of week in my life videos, shopping hauls, current favorites and routine videos. Within her videos she talks about her college life, her boyfriend, spin class, her sorority, makeup, clothes and more. Sponsorships and brand deals, which most influencers live by, are frequent on her channel. The usual sponsors are HelloFresh, Revolve, Fabletics, thredUP, Casetify, Care/of and Princess Polly. She posts regularly once or twice a week, but sometimes more if there is a lot going on in her life, but she doesn’t have a designated day she uploads.

More consistent than her YouTube, Gals on the Go uploads every Wednesday without fail. Every podcast has the same structure. It starts off with some small chit-chat between Danielle and Brooke, then they go into their “Highlights and Lowlights”, favorites, and then they get into the meat of the podcast. The topics change and guests will make appearances as well. Just like her YouTube channel, her podcast has many sponsorships. Danielle and Brooke extended the podcast community and created a Facebook group where they could interact with their listeners on a daily basis. Gals on the Go even launched its own merch line recently.

A channel Danielle uses to reach her followers daily is Instagram. She is always posting whether it is in a story or on post. The content on her feed is aesthetically pleasing, lighthearted and fun. She uses similar editing styles with each post to make it cohesive. The content showcases her OOTDs, vacations, game days, and festivals. In each post she will tag the other people in the photo and the brand of the clothes she is wearing. Story highlights are also very present on her profile. Personally, I think she uses too many highlights.

Overall, I think that Danielle is a textbook influencer. She is consistently interacting with her followers and posting relatable content. She does brand deals and sponsorships which bring in her income along with AdSense. Danielle always has a positive attitude, and it seems like she never sleeps with all the projects she has going on. She has been an influencer for about eight years, and I don’t see her stopping anytime soon.

Digital Leader Reaction Post

For the past few weeks we have been reading Erik Qualman’s Digital Leader: 5 Simple Keys to Success and Influence. Overall, I have enjoyed the book and learned a lot, but one chapter really stuck with me. Chapter 7: Niche is the New Norm, has really made me think about where I am right now, and what I want to do in the future. As a senior is in college who is unsure about her future this chapter helped bring some light to the situation and has me thinking about what I am passionate about.

After reading this chapter, it has made me come to terms with the fact that as much as I want to find what I am supposed to do right away that might not be the case. I didn’t realize that some successful people were not always doing what they are doing now. James Patterson and Robin Roberts have found their passion and are enjoying it, but they didn’t find it right away. I really like that Qualman put their stories in this chapter as well as Ray Kroc’s story. I think it is important for people to know you must go through certain situations, and even fail to get to where you are supposed to be. Qualman adds great examples throughout the book to help the reader fully grasp the topics he discusses.

Finding your niche or something you are great at seems like an easy concept, but I think in today’s age people think they need to be successful in everything they do, and they need an abundant of skills to be considered great, especially young people. People in my generation are especially this way. I have seen many people close to me try and do many different things and spread themselves too thin. They want to be as well rounded as they can, but then they can’t give their best effort in everything they do. Qualman has done an excellent job in expressing why this is in his book. Qualman said “Being well rounded would be setting a goal of being the best advertising copywriter, advertising account executive, and media buyer. You may become good at all three, but very few would ever become great at all three at the same time.” This also ties into another chapter talking about the negative effects of multitasking. If you want to be well-rounded and great at multiple things you need to focus on them one at a time and not tackling everything at once.

I think one of the biggest takeaways from this chapter is the need to be yourself. In order to be a true digital leader, you need to be the same offline and online. People are very concerned with holding an unrealistic view of themselves on social media that when I meet people after I have seen their social media, I get confused on who they are sometimes.

“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.” —Dr. Seuss

I really like this quote Qualman added to this chapter. The quotes he includes through-out the book really add a supporting element to what he is writing. They have been one of the reasons I like the book as much as I do. He pulls information from many places and from many different people. He uses the work of others for support, and it helps the reader absorb the concepts.

“You must have the courage to be true to yourself.” —John Wooden

This chapter has made me think about my future and realize that I need to find my passion. Some takeaways I have gotten are to not spread myself too thin, to build a foundation in what I am doing, to stay true to who I am, and to know I am likely to fail before I become successful. I think this is a great book to help yourself grow and become a better leader online and offline.

How to make your customers feel important

Connecting with your customers and getting them involved with your company is the best way to keep them interested and coming back to buy your products. Dave Kerpen’s Likeable explains why involving your customers is incredibly important to your business. In Chapter 11 Kerpen gives great reasons for why social media is a great place to start making conversation with customers. I think that Kerpen gives great examples and explains the importance of making your customers feel like they have a voice.

Like Kerpen explained, prompting a question on a post rather than a state instantly make the reader think of a responsible. In turn this makes them more likely to respond to whatever you are asking. It is a simple way to involve your customers with a limited space to say what you would like. Instagram stories, which Kerpen Suggests, are a great way to ask questions to your audience, because not only are they getting a question they might actually want to respond to, this gives them an easy way to give their opinion. Because of the convenience of it, your audience is more likely to respond which means you are more likely to get results and actually see what your customers think about something. The important part is that you are having a conversation with your customer. You have to make them feel important and heard.

Another way you can do this is through Facebook and Twitter polls. Like Instagram it makes an easy way for your customers to respond to what you are asking. The polls can stay up for however long you want them to and then results become finalized. This is a fast and easy way to see how the masses your company connects with are feeling.

Besides asking questions, crowdsourcing is another great way to get your customers directing involving in the decision-making process for different products. Many companies are doing crowdsourcing which is using their customers to help create products. This makes the customer feel like their opinion and ideas matter to your company.

When I think of crowdsourcing, I always think of Lay’s because of a campaign they do to find the best new potato chip flavor. Lay’s asked their customers what flavor they wanted to see Lay’s make into an actual product. Lay’s took the contest down to a few suggestions of flavors and then put them on the shelves for people to try. Once they tried the flavors, they went to the website to vote on which is their favorite. Many people were involved in the creation and decision process on which was the best new flavor. According to Huffington Post, in their 2013 campaign Lay’s received about 3.8 million submissions for ideas. This instantly gave Lay’s millions of excited customers that wanted to try their new products because they were a part of the decision-making process. According to Chief Marketer, Lay’s got more than 22.5 million visits on Facebook a week and sales rose by 12%.

I knew making your customers feel involved was important, but I didn’t realize how effective it can be. Kerpen showed me that it can be as simple as a question or it can be a whole campaign. The only disagreement I have with this chapter is that Kerpen does not tell us about any bad examples. Someone can read a million good examples of something, but still mess something up because they don’t know how it could go wrong.

I will definitely take with me a lot of what Likeable and Dave Kerpen have taught me. This particular chapter stuck with me, and I think many businesses big and small can improve their customer involvement in some way.