Sharing Your Success Part Three: Twitter ROI

December 17, 2010 Leave a comment

This is the third in a series of posts exploring some of the ways you can gather data about your social media presences, make sense of it all, and report your findings. Read all three parts here; the most recent post is at the top of the page.

Measuring your Twitter presence turns out to be a little more complicated than Facebook. Instead of just one, there are several tools you can to use to get a good picture of your progress to date. Below, I list some of the tools I use (and each name is a link to that service), and summarize the service(s) they provide.

The Tools

Hootsuite: Dashboard for managing your Twitter presence. It can also be used to manage other social media tools (LinkedIn, Facebook) but I find that it is most effective for Twitter. Hootsuite includes a built-in URL shortener. Provides user stats such as language and home country. Lists your most popular tweets, and greatest advocates (users who retweet your content). Hootsuite, a previously free service, recently converted to a paid model. I find their new service and pricing menu a little overly complicated, but it still provides the useful services I’ve come to value.

Twitter Counter: Graphs the number of new followers of your Twitter account over time (see example below). Creating a graph for a time period of up to three months is free; six months or more requires you to send a tweet from your account lauding their services.

HashTweeps: Lists the number of times a particular hashtag was tweeted, the user(s) who tweeted it, and how many times that person tweeted it. Use this for measuring your institution’s hashtags.

WhoUnfollowedMe: Notifies you when users stop following you, which may help you better assess how your tweets are coming across to your followers.

Don’t forget to capture tweets that you want to highlight in your report – good conversation threads, positive feedback, etc. Copy and paste the text and the user who said it into a spreadsheet or database for future use. This is a similar tactic to the one I described in my earlier post about Facebook.

Analysis

Much of what I mentioned last week about analyzing your findings in Facebook applies to Twitter as well. Here’s what I said with a few updates for this week (changes in italics):

Take a good hard look at what the numbers and the comments are telling you. Ask questions such as:

  • Which tweets were more popular? Which ones weren’t as popular? Why do you think that is?
  • Which days of the week and time of day had more response than others?
  • Who retweets you most frequently?
  • What kinds of tweets cause people to unfollow you?

Asking good questions about what you’ve found will help you draw smart conclusions on your findings. Use those findings to set new goals. What new things will you try? What will you continue to do the same? What will you abandon entirely?

Next time, we’ll talk blogs – how many people read yours, and are they really reading it?

Note: Thanks to Andy Shaindlin of Alumni Futures for first telling me about HashTweeps.

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Sharing Your Success Part Two: Facebook ROI

December 8, 2010 3 Comments

This is the second in a series of posts exploring some of the ways you can gather data about your social media presences, make sense of it all, and report your findings. Read part one here.

Facebook: One Tool to Rule them All

In this post, I’ll highlight the built-in metrics tool for Facebook, as well as some other hints to putting together a report from your findings. Social tools like Twitter require you to make use of several third party services to get information about your audience and growth. But Facebook has one, built-in tool that can handle most of your data-driven needs.

Quantitative Measurement

In the left-hand column of your Facebook Page, you’ll find a section called “Insights” and a small link that says “see all.” Click it, and you’ll be presented with a couple of graphs representing the status of your Page. While these graphs are all well and good for a quick snapshot, the most important part lies under the “Export” button in the top right corner. Click that and you’ll see this:

Select your time frame and click download. What you get (either in CSV or XLS) is all the info you’ve ever wanted about your Page, dumped out into a big ugly spreadsheet. BUT all of that ugly is soon to become your best friend. That spreadsheet contains the raw data to create custom graphs and charts depicting the exact parameters you want to highlight and display. Using the charts tool within your spreadsheet software of choice, you can graph the number of “Likes” you’ve garnered over time, the increase in Fans, anything you like.

Back on the Insights page, there are two more links in the left hand column: one called “Users” and one called “Interactions.” The Users section will provide valuable info about your audience members – including age and gender. Interactions will give you data about how your audience interacted with individual wall posts.

The Users section provides valuable information about your audiences you can’t find elsewhere due to the fact that Facebook can pull internal data from individual user’s profiles.

Qualitative Measurement

Don’t forget to capture positive comments and interactions on your wall. Use whatever system you’d like: take a screen shot, copy and past the text into a spreadsheet or database, whatever works for you. Just remember to keep all of them in one place so you can pull them up later and share them.

Analysis

Gathering all of this information together in one place doesn’t mean your task is complete. Now the real work begins: the analysis. Take a good hard look at what the numbers and the comments are telling you. Ask questions such as:

  • Which posts were more popular? Which ones weren’t as popular? Why do you think that is?
  • Which days of the week had more response than others?
  • Who are your biggest fans?
  • Who is re-posting your content to their Page?

Asking good questions about what you’ve found will help you draw smart conclusions on your findings. Use those findings to set new goals. What new things will you try? What will you continue to do the same? What will you abandon entirely?

Stay tuned for next week’s ROI installment: Twitter.

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Sharing Your Success: Reporting Social Media ROI

December 1, 2010 1 Comment

When the time comes for you to “justify your existence” to the higher ups at your institution, will you be prepared?

One of the most important aspects of using social media to engage and converse with your audiences is to record the impact of those efforts – not just quantitatively, but qualitatively. And eventually, the powers that be will come a knocking. They’ll be asking you to report to the board of directors or the VP or the president on just what you’ve been doing and why it is valuable. This isn’t the time to shrink in fear – this is the time for you to shine!

In a series of upcoming posts, I’ll outline some of the tools I use to gather data, crunch the numbers, and put together cohesive reports on the various social technologies. I’ll specifically highlight Facebook and Twitter, two of the most popular social tools today. Here are a few things to remember as you gather your findings and put together your report(s):

Summarize: you may have the best facts, figures, graphs and charts on earth. But you are presenting your findings to busy people who may not have the time or the inclination to dig deep and fully absorb all of your hard work. Don’t be insulted, just know your audience. Condense your findings into a brief executive summary and place it at the beginning of your document. Include the nitty gritty details after the summary; those who seek more detail will find it at their fingertips.

Highlight: here’s your chance to show off. Directly quote some of the great things people have said about your institution, something interesting you’ve learned, or a new contact you’ve made thanks to your efforts and include it in your report. Share your anecdotal evidence of success.

Benchmark: how do you stack up? While there might not be a lot of public data for you to compare with your institution’s, you can still do internal comparisons. How have things changed from month to month? In the past year? Work with what you know to demonstrate growth.

Clearly state your goals: talking about how great you’re doing is all well and good, but where do you go from here? Be specific. “Our goal is to double our total twitter followers in the next six months” or “we plan to increase admissions applications by 25% this year using Facebook.”

Stay tuned for more as I highlight some of the great (and sometimes free) tools out there to help you collect your data.

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Engaging Young Alumni

November 2, 2010 1 Comment

I’m in Atlanta this week serving as a faculty member for the Academic Impressions “Reaching Young Alumni: Key Building Blocks for Lifelong Relationships” conference. I’ll be talking about social media strategy and engagement, including topics like community management, developing strategy, and getting buy-in from the higher ups in your institution.

If you’ll be at the conference, please say hi. And if not, follow along on Twitter with the hashtag, #AIYoungAlumni.

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Four Tips for Feeding the Social Media Beast

March 30, 2010 Leave a comment

Keeping social media content fresh is a job all by itself. How do you keep content from going stale without feeling overwhelmed? What do to when you don’t have breaking news to tweet, blog or post? Here are a few tips for keeping that hungry social media beast fat and happy:

Teamwork: Use your colleagues, friends and family for new ideas. What’s new? What’s interesting? What do they want to hear more about? Use these questions as a way to brainstorm and get new ideas for content.

Keep a List: Store your ideas in a Google doc, as draft posts, or even written down good old-fashioned paper. Circle back to them when you feel stuck.

Keep Your Post Pantry Well Stocked: Start writing out posts in advance; they’ll be ready to roll when you feel like you’ve got nothing to say. Choose subjects that are not time sensitive, and can be posted days or weeks in the future.

Plan Ahead: This can be tough, but planning your posts a week or two in advance can help you feel less manic. It also insures that your content is part of a cohesive strategy, not a one-off without clear direction or purpose.

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