5 Questions Every Manager Wants to Know about Social Media

Answered with Charts That Bring Your Data Together. In One Report.

Ever been in that meeting. The one where your CMO / CEO / VP / Board Member says “Ok, all this different data is great but how do things all line up against each other? How do we know which channel does the most for us?” If I had a $1 for every time I heard that question in my career, I’d have a lot more pairs of skis than I do now. And if I had a dollar for every hour I’ve spent trying to pull all that data into one report and then make sense of it all, my ski-cabin fund would be a lot more robust. This is a pain all us marketers know far too well.

Today is our lucky day. My amazing partners-in-crime here at Simply Measured have been working on this one for a while and I’m happy to announce the birth of the All Social Media Channels Report (or what we lovingly call Triple Threat). The report that turns your hot-mess of disparate data sources into one fine looking report.

To show off this hotness in action we’ve been tracking the Green Bay Packers and will be using real data to show how you can easily answer the following questions and show your manager how it all comes together.

Q1: How do your networks stack up?
In the first section there is a break down of your audience by network and you can identify the biggest area of growth you’ve had in a given time period. And that includes growth in audience size, outbound communication or engagement.

For the GB Packers it’s interesting to note that their strongest (largest audience) following is on Facebook.

Q2: When are people most engaged?
There are a couple different ways to answer this question. Starting with what days in the month are people most engaged. Not surprisingly for the GB packers their activity spikes on game days.

Next we can see which day over the past 7 had the biggest engagement activity. Given that Sunday was game day during this particular week, we can easily say it was the most engaged day. This can also be helpful because if you see an anomaly in the data you can figure out what happened to cause that. For the GB Packers it could be that the team was in the news for some reason or a promotion was held.

You can also take a look at when during the day are people most engaged. Again, no shockers here that people are talking most about the game, as it is happening.

Q3: Where do people engage?
Ahh the million dollar question – which does more for your brand, Facebook or Twitter? From this chart we can quickly see which networks are doing the most and which ones have the opportunity to do more. From our example data we can see that GB Packers fans are much more engaged on Facebook than Twitter. It might mean that GB fans hate Twitter, or more likely there is an opportunity to increase engagement there.

Q4: Who is engaging?
Ever wonder who is most engaged with your brand, regardless of network? Curious to see (without manually counting) how many tweets or Facebook posts your top fans/followers are engaging with about you? As marketers, knowing who these people are and finding ways to keep them happy is something we all have to do. With the data in this report you can identify who these people are, keep tabs on them and if appropriate find ways to engage with them.

Q5: What are people engaging about?
Now that we’ve answered the who, where, and when, the last piece is what are people engaging about. From this chart you can identify what the topics related to your brand that people care the most about. This data will help you optimize the kinds of information you feed your community and can help you target your message for your different channels. Sometimes what works well on Facebook can fail miserably on Twitter (or vice-versa). Or you may realize what people are blogging about is very different than what people are tweeting about. Armed with this knowledge you can get your networks to do more work for you.