Let’s Talk Metrics
Social Media is growing up. We have more platforms and more thought leadership than ever before, but already our friends are trusting us less. In the beginning, there was sticky. Now we’re connected. And we want our content to be slippery, easy to pass on to our friends, and their friends, and their friends. I think reach, across users and across platforms, is becoming as important as volume.
Fortunately, there’s a nearly endless array of free online tools that can help us measure who we’re reaching, what they’re saying, and how they found us. I recently needed to capture the Social Media Footprint of an organization (Vocalo — “the YouTube of Radio”). I tried to follow their digital tracks to figure out, via backwards induction, their Social Media Strategy. Here’s what I found, in pictures. Or skip to the end to see the final report.
OVERVIEW
WEBSITE
Next page…Facebook and YouTube!
FACEBOOK
YOUTUBE
Up next…Twitter!
TWITTER
Percent of followers who last tweeted
Percent of followers who identify as a professional
Percent of followers who began following you in
Percent of followers with a second order reach of
Percent of followers who identify as
Whew. Ok. We’re almost done. We’ve covered the big sites. Now it’s on to more niche sites that particularly make sense for Vocalo.
Wikipedia
We made it!! Click one last time to see the final report.
So that’s the publicly available data. You could analyze yourself, benchmark against your peers, or stalk your competitors. There’s a whole other set of free online tools you can use if you’re trying to just look at your own brand. But that’s a topic for another post.
Now that you’ve got this overwhelming amount of data, you have to try to make strategic sense of it. What does the data tell you? Based on what Vocalo’s doing (or not doing), what’s working? Where are their fans engaged? How could they be doing a better job?
View more documents from Devon Smith.
But don’t take just my word for it. Check out the master of metrics himself, Avinash Kaushik, he’s the “Analytics Evangelist” for Google. Many thanks also to my fabulous classmates Rob Levy and Meredith Trainor for putting up with my endless rambling about the awesomeness of social media metrics.
So did I miss any cool tools that you use? Think any of the tools I used are utter BS (shhh, I’m not totally convinced about all of them either)? Know of a better way of collecting this mountain of data? Do tell!
