Social Media Wish List for 2012

January 1, 2012 2 Comments

Wish List

Photo courtesy of Plindberg on Flickr

While 2011 was a banner year for social media growth in the business world, those of us in the profession are still struggling with measuring the results of our efforts. In the hopes that 2012 will bring us functional tools for analyzing all that data, here’s my early wish list for Santa in 2012. If you have a recommendation for a tool for any of the items mentioned on my list, feel free to comment and post your links. I welcome your suggestions! And Santa, I promise to be good all year.

Fan Interest Graphing

Facebook insights, for example, gives us information on our fan page demographics such as age, gender, where likes came from (external referrers) and such, there’s still no good way to see and graph the interests (likes) of our fans. Say for example, a majority of your fans are interested in skiing. Providing content on the topic could help keep them engaged and sharing. So far none of the free services I’ve found give us a way to access this data so it’s included here on my wish list.

Social Media Dashboard

While tools like Tweetdeck, Hootsuite, Social Mention and Google Alerts allow us to track and analyze Key Performance Indicators (KPI), I’d like a tool that allows me to aggregate all my social media accounts and posts on one dashboard and then share that dashboard with fans and followers. If you’re interested in tracking dashboards, Barry Hurd’s blog post on Social Media Dashboards give a good outline of the tools available now for tracking conversations. Here’s your chance to make a suggestion if you have a favorite tool for tracking, or for setting up a magazine-like page for all your streams.

Trending Data

I’d like a way to see what was trending in, say, New Orleans, for a date in the past. Twitter’s trending tools allow us to see what’s trending now, and what’s trending in a particular location, but not both location and date specific. At least, I’ve not yet found a good tool to do this. Any suggestions?

Ranking System by Industry

Even though there’s a lot of eye rolling when it comes to discussing metrics like Klout in the social media communities, it does offer some valuable insights. The problem lies in measuring everyone against everyone else, Justin Beiber included. I’d like to know how my clients measure against others in their industry. Since Klout uses the influence of your followers as part of the metric, B2B companies looking to engage with small, niche businesses will naturally have lower Klout scores than B2C companies able to engage highly influential followers. Again, if you have a suggestion feel free to let me know.

Social Media Workflow Tools

I know that Hootsuite allows for post coordination under its paid version, which I’ve not tried. I have heard good things about BufferApp.Com and it looks like collaboration tools are included in the free version. Scheduling posts to fan pages is part of the paid version. While the free dashboard Tweetdeck does allow scheduling to all accounts collaboration tools are absent. Any suggestions?

As the year progresses I’m sure my list will change as fast as the landscape of social media changes. As always, I welcome your comments and ideas here, on Twitter @suereynolds or on Facebook.

Happy New Year!

Filed under Business, Facebook, social media Tagged with , , , , ,

Have Social Media Analysts Gone Crazy?

June 22, 2011 5 Comments

Sometimes I think if I hear the word “engage” one more time I’m going to scream. Please understand. I’m in a unique position where I interact with social media “experts” selling their services daily. I’ve seen their bios and I’ve read their tweets. There’s a lot of excitement over “engagement” and sentiment analysis and there’s a “wild west” sort of mentality where self proclaimed experts are rushing in to fill the void.

In some ways we’re all guilty of it, we social media professionals. We use words like “engage” and “connect” and “brand relationship.”  There are legitimate firms out there taking good money for building Facebook pages and developing Twitter strategies and then reporting back to their clients on sentiment, number of followers and “engagement.”

There is some truth to these numbers so I don’t want to completely minimize their importance. These tools allow us to measure our fans’ and followers’ interaction or *wince* engagement with our brand. We can see, in granular detail, what people click on, what they comment on, when they visit, what they “like.”  Social media firms put together glossy reports on this stuff and tailor their strategies to it and it looks and feels like important information and in some ways it is. In a lot of ways though, it isn’t.

Snake Oil

Image courtesy of rankmagic.com

It’s snake oil.

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again. Numbers of followers and sentiment can’t measure the success of your social media strategy. Clear through the hysteria and hype and remember that there is a person at the other end of that tweet or Facebook post. That person represents a potential or current customer or in a B2B environment, a representative for a business prospect. What do they care about? What can we do to help them? Of course, the most important question is, are they going to buy from you and then tell their friends about it? How do we get them to do that?

Businesses need social media analysts with a deep understanding of social media tools and how to use them to foster these relationships. They need people with a business background and an understanding of marketing principals, search engine optimization skills, good grammar and spelling (yes that matters) and a genuine passion for people and their profession. They need specialists that can measure how all this can and will translate into more business.

There are lots of talented social media professionals out there that can offer this to their clients. Whether it is training on the tools or a session on strategy, these professionals can help businesses succeed in this “wild west” environment. If you do decide to take the plunge, make sure you’re working with one of them. Make sure they’re offering you real bottom line value.

I’d love to hear your stories. What, as a business owner, are you looking for in a consultant? Comment here, or send me a tweet @suereynolds or leave me a post on my Facebook page.

Filed under Business, Facebook, Marketing, social media, Twitter Tagged with , , , , , , , , , ,

How do you Measure Success on Social Media?

May 26, 2011 2 Comments

I’m thankful when my clients ask this question. So often businesses and non profits jump onto Facebook and Twitter without clear goals let alone a strategy to measure them. “Everyone’s doing social so we should do it too” isn’t a good enough answer. Hubspot’s research reinforces the idea that B2B marketers are increasing their inbound marketing budgets with a shift toward social media. This trend is not surprising, but without a clear idea of where they’re headed and why they’re going there, these folks could be wasting money.

Courtesy of Hubspot.com

If you are one of these organizations you need to know why you’re entering the social spaces and what you hope to attain. There isn’t a one size fits all answer to this question, but here are some options:

  • Lead generation

  • Sales

  • Increased web traffic

  • Additional exposure (reach) of your brand

What else? Why are you engaging with customers or clients in social spaces and how can you tell if you’re accomplishing your goals?

Before you can monitor the success of anything you have to measure it.  So measure where you are now against where you want to be. If you want additional web traffic and click throughs to your site, measure your traffic now and design your strategy around driving people to your site. Remember those calls to action on your content! Again, Hubspot’s research shows that social media has tremendous power to increase website traffic.  After some time, measure again. Did you accomplish your goal? Yes = success.

Courtesy of Hubspot.com

If you want to generate leads, measure how many leads you have coming into your organization now with your current marketing  methods. Design your strategy around generating leads through social methods. Perhaps use an email campaign to gather email addresses, or work on publishing compelling content on your blog and ask people to enter an email to download the content. The folks at Hubspot are geniuses at this – how do you think I got these charts? Anyway, how many leads does your content generate? Does it meet your goals? Yes = success.

If your goal is increased exposure of your brand, measure your reach now through web traffic and the reach of any additional marketing campaigns. How many people are you reaching? Publish content that builds followers. Measure retweets, followers, Facebook fans and comments. Study your Facebook insights and your site analytics carefully. How many more people are you reaching? Increased reach = success.

So how do you measure your success? I’d love your feedback and I promise I’ll respond.  Right now though, I need to read the email Hubspot just send me. :)

Filed under Business, Marketing, social media Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

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