Monitoring & Analyzing Social MediaEffectiveness

Lou Woodley @LouWoodley

Laura Wheeler @laurawheelers

#scioimpact

Intros Who are we?

•The nature.com Communities team

•Support NPG’s social media activities (Twitter, Facebook, G+, Pinterest etc)

•Support and promote NPG’s staff blogs – blogs.nature.com

•Update the nature.com Communities blogs – Of Schemes and Memes, Soapbox Science

•Event organisation – SpotOn (Science Policy Outreach and Tools Online) – annual 2 day conference in London (#solo12) and monthly events in NYC (#sonyc)

•Content and discussions around the events on the new SpotOn website.

Intros Who are you?

•Tell us a bit about yourself…

•Where are you from? What do you do? Are you representing yourself, an organisation or both?

•Is there anything in particular that you’d like to get out of today? Specific questions, goals or problems that you’d like to brainstorm?

Nice to meet you!

Intros What are we going to do today?

Intros

Setting goals - what impact would you like to have?

Measuring your impact:TrafficEngagement

Assessing impact – how to respond to the data to improve your strategies

We aim is to have lots of discussion, and some hands-on experimenting with the tools.

Impact What are your goals?

What are your goals when using social media?

You can’t assess your impact if you don’t know what you are trying to achieve!

Chose the right metric/tool to monitor each goal. You may need multiple metrics/tools.

You can’t always measure goals with raw numbers – perhaps you need to create your own reporting systems in addition to the various tools available.

Gather baseline metrics which you can compare your performance against: What happened last time you did something similar? What results do other people doing similar things achieve? Do you need to do an initial trial?

Do your goals as an individual differ from those when representing an organisation?

Impact Some possible goals

Increase traffic to your blog (Why?)Discussion and dissemination of scientific papers/science news (By whom?)Increase subscriptions to your site or sales of your productRaise awareness of an event, a new product, a petition, a fund-raising campaignTo reach specific groups (women in science, post-docs, teenagers)As a feedback channel (customer service, trouble-shooting, ideas gathering)To create loyalty via interactions with key users, subject expertsRecruitment

These would each be more specific e.g. double traffic in 6 months

Impact Some possible goals

To be sociable and part of a community! Find interesting content, contacts and conversation

Community = people + shared interests

Source of motivation and support e.g. #PhDchat, #madwriting

To raise your online profile – be seen as a subject area expert, networking

Job seeking

What are your goals?

Impact Questions to ask when setting goals

Are your goals the same for all social media channels?

Does this affect what content you post on different channels?

Do you have multiple goals at any one time? How does this affect your strategy and how you monitor your results? Is the same person/team responsible for the activity on all channels?

Has anything changed recently with any of the social media platforms that may need some background research/extra training? Will this change any of your baseline metrics?

Do your goals change? Are some very short-term e.g. to sell all the tickets for a one-off event? Are others long-term? e.g. to provide ongoing customer service with all queries answered within an hour.

Impact Questions to ask when setting goals

Do you have all the support you need to make achieving your goals worthwhile e.g. if you’re seeking feedback, do you have somewhere to share it or someone within your organisation who is going to take it seriously?

Will you need to record and report any of your metrics? Do you have template documents to populate with the data?

Will you need to carry out any training or establish any best practice guidelines?

Are there friends and other contacts that you could reach out to who might be willing to amplify your activities?

Impact Setting GoalsGOAL: Encourage online participation in a real-life event in NYC from attendees elsewhere in the US and the UK.

POSSIBLE METRICS:

Number of tweets on the event hashtagNumber of unique users tweeting on the hashtagNumber of influential users tweeting on the hashtagIncrease in number of followers of the account associated with the eventTraffic to blog posts on the event websiteNumber of blog posts written about the event on other sites (and which ones)How many days before/after the event does the hashtag continue to be used?

e.g. #sonyc, #reachingoutsci, #PhDelta

If similar events are to be hosted, this data can be used to create a baseline against which future events can be compared.

Impact Setting GoalsEach social site has different social impact indictors.

e.g.

Twitter: followers, mentions, RTs, favourites Facebook: likes / comments / sharesBlog: subscribers, views, visits, comments YouTube: views, commentsPinterest: repins, likes, followers

Alone, these figures can be relatively meaningless. For instance, you may have a high follower count but not much engagement. Need to dig deeper to interpret them more fully.

Let’s have a look at some tools that might be helpful…

Tools Traffic

 

•What you can learn from traffic analytics?

•Where in the world your readers are coming from•How long they stay on your site for and whether they look at other pages there•Which topics are most popular•Which times to post are most popular (and how long interest in a post lasts)•Whether to repost content again at a later date (#windbackweds)•Which referral sites/platforms are working for you

•Traffic data are OPEN metrics – no weird algorithms to massage the raw data

•We’ll mention:•Google Analytics•Chartbeat•plumanalytics.com/•Bitly

Tools Traffic – Google Analytics

 

•Google Analytics can track the impact of social media traffic on your site, going beyond clicks, retweets and other vanity metrics.

•Also have the option at looking at traffic in real time.

#1: Identify Where Your Social Traffic Comes From (Could help with organising events, Facebook location targeted ads)#2: Determine What Social Media Traffic Comes From Mobile Devices(Means you may want to check how your content shows up on mobile devices) #3: Who are your social referrals?

•How does this data inform your actions? Change your Facebook tactics to try to get more traffic? Spend more time on Twitter because this is what’s giving you the best results?

Tools Traffic – Google Analytics

 

Google Analytics offer Campaign Codes, allowing you to track specific social activities.

For example you can add a campaign code to the end of any URL you wish to track, e.g.

utm_campaign=ScienceOnline2013  

Then go to Traffic->Campaigns and you'll see "ScienceOnline2013" and you'll see metrics for that specific post (pages/visit, avg. time on site, plus more).

This helps you to measure the performance of individual posts, from specific social sites.

For more info on Google Analytics and how to get the best out of your campaigns, check out these posts:

http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/measure-social-media-traffic-using-google-analytics/

http://www.eugenoprea.com/advanced-segments-in-google-analytics/

Tools Traffic – Google Analytics

Tools Traffic - Chartbeat

 

Tools Traffic - bitly

Tools Traffic – Plum Analytics

 

Plum Analytics tracks the following metrics:

Usage - Downloads, viewsCaptures - Favourites, bookmarks, saves, readers, groups, watchersMentions - blog posts, news stories, Wikipedia articles, comments, reviewsSocial media - Tweets, +1's, likes, shares, ratingsCitations - PubMed, Scopus, patents

•This requires a subscription

Tools Engagement

What is “engagement”?

Define what this means for you – maybe you could create a scale that represents increasing effort made by your community or increasing value to you achieving your goals?

Number of likes on a FB post Number of comments on a FB post or blog post?Number of tweets on a hashtagNumber of people who subscribe to an RSS feedNumber of people prepared to watch the livestream of an event and live tweet itNumber of people willing to provide content for your site (paid or free)Number of people willing to organise or moderate a panel at an eventNumber of people prepared to purchase a product

Tools Engagement - Topsy

•Topsy is a useful tool for observing social discussions.

•Can be used to scan Twitter, Google+.

•Attempts to rank results by influence, effectively filtering spam.

Tools Engagement – social mention

• Social Mention is a free tool that scans over 100 social media outlets and returns a list about where you are mentioned.

•It then tries to associate sentiment to these posts – are people saying nice things, bad things, or neutral things?

•While the site can be inconsistent and has other issues, for example it is not so great for Twitter, it gives a good indication what people are saying.

Tools Engagement – Facebook Insights

•Facebook Insights are free, but you must have at least 30 likes on your page to qualify for them.

Tools Engagement – Agorapulse

•Agorapulse helps you analyse your Facebook activities, providing statistics. This is not a free service and requires a subscription.

•Agorapulse can also help you to analyse your competitors’ activities and tell you the best times to post to Facebook.

Analysing Assessing accounts

You’ve run a social media campaign or dabbled with a few social media platforms – now what?

Take the data you’ve collected and decide whether you need to tweak your activities…

Analysing Klout

•Klout currently tracks a user’s Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Foursquare, Google+.

•The Klout Score is the measurement of your overall online influence. The scores range from 1-100 with higher scores representing a wider and stronger sphere of influence.

Analysing Klout

Some thoughts on Google+ influence from the Klout blog: http://corp.klout.com/blog/2011/11/do-you-have-google-klout/

Comparing Social Actions on Google+, Twitter, and Facebook Key similarities:

A comment, like or +1 on either Facebook or Google+ is a sign of engagement between the user who posted the content and the user who commented / liked / +1ed it.

A +1 on Google+ is similar to a like on Facebook, in the sense that both are validation mechanisms for “approval” of content.

A Reshare on Facebook or Google+ or a Retweet on Twitter both propagate the original content to a wider audience.

Important differences: A comment or a Like on Facebook may cause your content to appear in the news feed

of mutual friends. On Google+ a comment or +1 surfaces your content not just to mutual friends but to anyone who has added you to their circles.

+1s on Google+ may also cause your content to appear in Google search results. Due to the larger size of the network, a Retweet on Twitter may propagate your content

to a wider audience than a Reshare on Google+ or Facebook. On the other hand, a Reshare on Google+ or Facebook may help you engage with an active audience, even if the size of the audience is smaller.

Analysing PeerIndex

How PeerIndex describes what it measures:

Topic fingerprint: a snapshot of what you talk about. 

Topic resonance: how much other people find what you share valuable. 

Comparisons: compare yourself to your friends and peers.

TOP TIP: There’s a Chrome plugin that lets you see a user’s PeerIndex score in your Twitter stream

Analysing PeerIndex

•Peerindex also has a (now) separate service that allows you to create groups of up to 100 people.

•You can use these to view the scores of people you’re interested in and track some of their tweets

•Browsing other public groups can help you to identify online influencers that you might want to interact with or watch for tips

•http://groups.peerindex.com/

Analysing Kred Story

•Kred enables users to obtain a visual “tiled” dashboard of your most influential social posts.

•These posts may contain links, videos, pictures or other social content.

•You can then analyse these important moments for trends.

Analysing Pinterest toolsThere are also similar impact measurements for Pinterest: Pinpuff and PinReach.

Analysing Impact Scores

Summary

It can be appealing to have a single number to measure your impact, but such scores should be used carefully!  Many are “closed” metrics – they use unknown algorithms to generate a number.

Do not use as the only indication of social impact.

Remember to gather baseline statistics for comparisons and use common sense to check if the scores match your experiences.

 

Analysing Activity

The SocialBro desktop app is useful for analysing your Twitter use.

This is not a free service but some of it’s functions are really useful.

Create Tag clouds from your community Find the best time to tweet Find and manage followers Manage Twitter lists Demographics

Analysing Times to engage

•Crowdbooster provides real-time Facebook and Twitter analytics.

•It also offers recommendations, for example when is the best time to engage online.

•You can manage multiple accounts, schedule posts, shorten links via bit.ly and set analytic alerts.

•This is not a free service.

Analysing TwentyFeet

•Twentyfeet is a synergy between SocialBro and crowd booster.

•Does a few things crowd booster doesn’t do.

•Using just one dashboard isn't the best practice to use a couple can mean you get more information.

Analysing Aggregating and curating

•Social media can have a short half-life. Platforms don’t always make past updates easy to find or conversations easy to follow.

•If you’d like to archive key conversations e.g. around specific events or a particular topic of interest, you can use tools such as Storify.

•You can then alert everyone you have included in the Storify to help you to spread the word and possibly continue the conversation.

•Other tools to explore: RebelMouse, Branch.

Analysing Referral traffic

If you’re looking for really big boosts in traffic, several news aggregator sites might be worth exploring.

Reddit has become increasingly popular - but take note of its spam policy.

Does bounce rate matter to your goals? What’s a meaningful page view?

Other sites that may be worth investigating:

DiggStumbleUponSlashdotHacker News

Analysing Managing multiple accounts

•Do you need to have a presence on multiple social media sites, does it help with impact?

•Use larger accounts to help spread the word about new accounts or accounts for one-off events

•Managing multiple sites tools:

Dark Social You can’t monitor everything!•Dark social includes traffic sent to your website/blog from social sharing such as email recommendations or links posted into IM conversations.

•Doesn’t show up as social traffic

•Image source: The Atlantic http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/10/dark-social-we-have-the-whole-history-of-the-web-wrong/263523/

To continue Links

Useful set of entry level videos on social media use: http://vimeo.com/57241964

30 social media monitoring tools, plus more suggestions in the comments: http://www.tripwiremagazine.com/2011/07/social-media-monitoring-tools.html

Wiki of useful links to social media articles established by Christie Wilcox http://socialnetworkingforscientists.wikispaces.com

Matt Shipman’s post on thinking about “unconventional” metrics http://www.scilogs.com/communication_breakdown/unconventional-metrics/

More tips on measuring impact http://www.wdfm.com/marketing-tips/jim-sterne-social-media.php

Alphabetical list of some social media tools to check out http://www.andymiah.net/2012/12/30/the-a-to-z-of-social-media-for-academics/

Thank you!

If you’d like to contribute any other useful links to the google doc, please do!

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jSnjhNFOf8Bem7IxaHUthS7i_BtoDkELlrWYh5PtIAc/

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