ROI Update: Report Templates in Hootsuite

March 15, 2011 Leave a Comment

If you’re a Hootsuite user, you may have noticed a new built-in tool provided by our friend, the Owl. It’s called Report Builder. This new tool makes generating data reports a little more streamlined and a little easier. But as I discussed in my series of posts about ROI, numbers and graphs aren’t the only thing you need to provide insight into your social media presences. YOU and your human brain are still the most important element.

Here’s how it works: log in to Hootsuite, and in the left hand column you’ll see an icon that looks like a bar graph. Click it, and you’ll have access to the Report Builder. Click “create new report” to get started.

You can choose a built-in reporting template, or create one from scratch. The drag and drop interface lets you customize to your heart’s content, and you can add in the different elements you want to highlight from Twitter, Facebook, and Google Analytics. Some of the more customized options require you to spend “points” – the Owl’s currency. Pro Users automatically get 50 points per month, and you can add more points on an a la carte basis as needed. Don’t worry, free users: there are still plenty of tools for you to implement as well. You can also opt to have your report sent to your inbox on a regular basis, should you want reports delivered to you or your team.

In all, this service makes things a little easier to get under the hood and pull together data from disparate sources. But it doesn’t do away with the human element – actually taking a look at the data, analyzing it, and making strategic choices based on the results. Yes, the Owl is pretty cool, but he can’t replace you…yet.

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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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Why Can’t I Quit You, Facebook?

May 16, 2010 2 Comments

There has been quite a bit of hubbub about Facebook lately, particularly about the arrogant attitude towards privacy and user data. Yes, Facebook sucks, and has managed to steadily increase its suckitude over the past few years. But even with the calls for quitting Facebook, many of us still linger (myself included).

Why?

Staying connected to friends: There are people in my life I’d lose contact with completely if I left Facebook. I like having an ambient awareness of what they’re up to and what they’re working on. These people don’t have blogs, twitter feeds or utilize other ways for me to connect with them socially online. So for right now, I don’t have a good replacement for Facebook for this purpose.

Keeping up with Facebook itself: My consulting clients’ communications strategies almost always include Facebook. I have to be a Facebook native in order to speak intelligently about it and have a grasp on its ins and outs. If I leave Facebook entirely, my intimate understanding of the user experience will weaken and eventually fade entirely. Setting up a fake profile wouldn’t give me the same ability to learn the subtle nuances, specifically the ways in which Facebook connects users to one another, to brands, to services, and to the web.

So what to do?

Give Facebook as little information about yourself as possible: Zuckerberg and crew do not need to know your address, your cell phone number, your favorite books or your relationship status. If all you want to do is find old friends, keep education info simply to find former classmates. Otherwise, get all of the irrelevant details out of your profile and lock your profile down. Don’t install applications (yes, this means Farmville, Mafia Wars and Sorority Life). The less Facebook knows about you, the better.

Set your privacy settings: If you haven’t done this yet, DO IT NOW. Don’t assume that Facebook (or any online tool, for that matter) is going to protect your privacy by default. When you set up a new profile on any site or service, check the privacy settings and the privacy policy. It just makes good sense.

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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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Thanks Twitter, Facebook: How I Got News about the Eureka Earthquake

January 10, 2010 Leave a Comment

I’m from Eureka, a relatively rural town of about 30,000 people in Northern California. For those of you unfamiliar with the foggy, green, quiet town where I was born and raised, here’s a map.

Saturday afternoon, Eureka was hit with a 6.5 earthquake. The majority of my extended family still lives in Eureka, and I was very concerned. Not only about the potential for earthquake damage, but about the potential for a tsunami (there was one up there in the 60s, and it killed 11 people). My sister and I weren’t able to reach our Mom and Dad right away; cell signals were dead and land lines were unreliable.

So how did I get details about what happened and how the town fared? From the Internet, of course.

But not from online newspapers. No, I got my info from my Facebook network and from Twitter:

Mind you, these posts are from Facebook friends who don’t even live in Eureka any longer, but they had spoken to their respective families. This at least reassured me that Eureka wasn’t underwater, or complete rubble.

Twitter gave me some other pieces to the puzzle as well, thanks to the #Eureka hashtag (search it now for ongoing info). Even Mashable was running a story that featured user @amyeureka‘s Twitter photos of the aftermath.

Thanks to all of these, I was able to at least get some idea of the current status: no reported deaths, no tsunamis, no obliterated buildings. Just a lot of broken glass, toppled bookcases and broken chimneys. I could make a somewhat reasonable assumption that at least my family was alive, though maybe missing a few picture frames and glassware. And I wouldn’t have obtained that information from broadcast news or the paper.

The good news? I was finally able to make contact with my family: thankfully, the only casualty at Mom and Dad’s was a television.

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