Social Media Insights – A Strategic View

The starting point for all your social media insights is your strategy — what do you want to accomplish? Gain more subscribers? Get leads? Make sales?

Social Media Insights

From these goals, you establish KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) — in other words what tells you you’re reaching your goals. When you’re talking about making sales, you’re KPIs involve traffic (the more traffic to your site, the more sales), conversion (what % of visitors actually buy something), and AOV (average order value) or how much does the average buyer buy in $ or # products.

Next, you’ll look for specifics within each of these KPIs. For instance, when looking at conversion, it’s also helpful to see what path visitors took. Did certain paths result in higher conversion than others? You’ll also want to look at what caused visitors to abandon their carts — a major problem in online shopping. Did visitors get to a certain screen than abandon? Maybe there’s something wrong with that screen. Does it load slowly? Ask for information you could live without — the more information consumers are asked to provide, the more likely they are to abandon? Were there other issues that might cause abandonment, such as asking for information consumers already entered on an earlier screen.

In other words, you’re trying to get to the root cause of problems.

Collect -> Analyze -> Decide -> Deliver

Social media insights involves a deliberate process for collecting the data you need without getting buried in non-essential data, analyzing the data, making decisions based on the data, then delivering changes to processes based on these decisions.

The social media insights process requires careful thinking about your KPIs and a disciplined set of procedures for accomplishing change based on insights.

Once you know which KPI’s you need, collect data across websites and social networks. This can be a little challenging, despite the great tools out there that help. I use Hootsuite to bring my analytics together, but it’s still hard to get insights with everything in separate files. I’m currently looking for a good solutions to this problem and welcome input from folks who’ve mastered this.

Social media insights

The solution I’m toying with now is using IBM’s Cognos software to analyze across multiple data feeds. Of course, the problem is getting the data in there — especially since I’m not a programmer. Right now, I’m importing CSV files from my social networks and Google Analytics to create a dashboard showing everything going on in my social media campaigns.

Cognos has a FREE download for personal use. I’ll update you on this dashboard once I feel it’s ready for public display.

Need help with your social media analytics

I know, this stuff is mind-bending if you’ve never worked with it before. My brain was seriously expanded after spending a week in training with IBM’s top folks.

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