5 Steps to an Insightful Social Media Report

Social media data can tell you how popular a topic is, which content is getting the most attention on your website or what hashtag is gaining attention on the Internet. Marie Smith, a data analyst at Smart Technologies Consulting and Infogram ambassador, hosted a webinar with Infogram’s Andrew Matsubara to discuss tools and tips to create insightful social media reports using Infogram.

Smith broke down the process into 5 key steps. Here are the steps and what they entail:

1. Examine the data as a whole

Social media is more than just Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram. Social media is about how people are talking about your brand everywhere in the internet.

There is so much data you can find on the Web in regards of social media. Who is ranting about what and the hot topics of the day. Smith shared two tools that can help you gather the data in a quick and easy way.

Mention, a real-time monitoring application, can help analyze keywords and mentions throughout social media. The application does not only monitor major social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, but news websites, videos, images and so forth. You can also track at what time of day that keyword or hashtag was most active.

The second tool Smith discussed is called Domo. One feature that is different from Mention is that you can track a keyword like ‘Ban the Box’ (the example she used) and check popular news websites to see if they are writing any articles on that keyword.

2. Take the noise out of the data

Data is frequently full of noise; things like different spellings of a name or different ways of referring to the same thing. The first step in working with data, according to Smith, is to normalize the information:

• Remove all data points that are not directly related to your analysis such as mentions of the subject in other contexts, or people that are just ranting. You’ll also want to take out spammers.
• Aggregate mentions that refer to the same concept, for example, different spellings of your brand or synonyms that people use.
• Take into account the date and time when the mentions occurred. Given the immediacy of social media, you can’t ignore the context of when and what people were talking about. Separate data into cohorts to get a more insightful report.
• Certain media, like Twitter, are inherently noisier. Start your analysis with less noisy social media formats like videos, blogs and pictures. Double-down on those first to understand which campaigns were most successful.
• Use benchmarks to evaluate success. Sometimes you can find these benchmarks by slicing the same data you collected to analyze your campaign, focusing on mentions of your competitors.

3. Find key stakeholders

Smith uses data visualization generated with Infogram to identify Twitter users that are talking the most about the topic. Once you’ve figured out who your supporters are, get in contact with them to build a relationship and develop your network of evangelists. After taking out the noise, you can tell which people are actually on the ground and making strides towards promoting your brand or topic. Analyse the data to understand not only who the most active users are, but also who the most influential ones are, and the sentiment of those mentions. Prioritize your outreach efforts based on that – volume isn’t everything.

Doing this kind of data analysis makes Smith’s outreach efforts much more effective, achieving a 60-90% success rate vs. the 1-3% that is typical in the internet. The key to this is to have a methodical process to find the opportunity.

4. Identify opportunity areas

Data visualization can also help you identify where your weak points are. Try analyzing the information to see if there are opportunity areas in certain demographic or geographic groups.

5. Develop Key Strategies

From the data gathered, Smith (and yourself) can create key strategies to focus on, in order to increase social media engagement. Take the insights you found and develop specific campaigns to address the weakness and exploit the strengths.  

Along with Smith’s insights, Andrew presented a step-by-step process for creating those reports using Infogram. You can find the final report here.