Twitter

Testing the Social Media Engagement Management Tool Sprout Social – Part 2

April 25, 2012 By Des Walsh 4 Comments

In March I posted about my exercise of evaluating the social media engagement tool Sprout Social. In this second post on the topic, I’m focusing on some of the reports generated by Sprout Social.

By the way, these posts are not intended as a comprehensive review: more by way of sharing my exploration of the tool.

Also, the information and comments are still based on using the basic Pro version. I’m hoping to make the time in the next couple of days to check out the other offerings – Small Biz, Deluxe and Premium.

Group Trends

The first graphic on the dashboard home page gives an overview of trends in my activity/engagement on Twitter and Facebook. Actually it’s a group report but when this screenshot was taken mine was a group of one. I’ve since added a company Twitter account and will be interested to see how that changes the results.

A distinction I did not notice at first was that whereas the Group Trends graphic shows numbers of new Facebook fans (zero right now for this new page of mine!), other reports on the dashboard reference Facebook impressions rather than fans, as is explained further below.

Audience Demographics

The next graphic image on the home page of my Sprout Social dashboard, was Audience Demographics, where a graph showed at a glance some basic demographics of my Twitter followers and “impressions” for my main Facebook page. (The page is relatively new and has a lot fewer “likes” than there are friends at my longer-standing Facebook profile.)

Actually, for all the time I had this trial account, the content on the right side was not available on the home page, being obscured by the ‘still gathering data” box, as shown in the screenshot below.

But at the same time the figures were available from the Group Report tab on the left sidebar.

Something that took me a while to notice, not because of lack of labeling but just from my own “speed reading”, that the figures for Facebook are not for numbers of “fans” (those *liking* my page) but for those to whom “impressions” could be attributed.

My understanding of Facebook “impressions” (or to be more precise, “post impressions”) is, contrary to what I’d thought, *not* the total number of times a post had been seen on Facebook but, according to leading Facebook expert Mari Smith “the total number of times your post was *rendered* in the stream (fans’ News Feeds + your page wall + social plugins)”.

The graphic above shows very clearly the relative proportions of male and female Twitter followers and of those responsible for the Facebook impressions, and the distribution across age groups from 18 to 65+ for Twitter and from 13 to 55+ for Facebook.

My results, as in the screenshot above, show a fairly even male/female distribution across both platforms, with a narrower gap for Facebook M/F 52/48 per cent than for Twitter M/F 57/43 per cent.

I found the age distribution results pretty encouraging. (Note that, although in the image above you can see the numeric percentages for Facebook but not for Twitter, in the image that comes up in your report online you can see the specific numbers by mousing over each bar.)

Because, allowing for the difference between Twitter follower and Facebook impression data, some quick extrapolation and aggregation shows me that my “audience” is predominantly from 24 to 55. For Twitter, that’s 84.5% and for the Facebook figures it’s equally 70% for men and women. That all works well for me in terms of who I’m focused on in my marketing.

By the same token, if I had found a big discrepancy between the stats and my strategic objectives – e.g. if there had been little or no sign of the 35-44 age group – I would have needed to do some deeper analysis and take appropriate remedial action on my Twitter and/or Facebook activity.

Reports

More detailed statistics are available from the report tabs.

The Twitter report includes:

General stats
Key indicators, such as engagement and influence
Follower demographics by age range and gender
Publishing – performance of outbound content

The Facebook Pages report includes:

Page impressions by date
Impressions breakdown by type, e.g. organic, viral or paid
Impressions by age and gender
Sharing – how people share and type of share
Sharing by age and gender
Your Content, including a content breakdown and effectiveness per item

Although I can get some of the content analysis from Facebook Insights, the Sprout Social details and layouts are not identical with those in Insights. For example, Insights shows me Reach and “People Talking About This” on a daily and weekly basis, and Sprout Social shows me Reach, People Talking About This and Engagement.

Content Statistics Facebook Des Walsh Page

Again with the Content Breakdown, there is similar information in Insights, but I find the presentation in Sprout Social more geared to challenging me on how well or otherwise I may be going with my engagement strategy implementation.

More Coming Soon

So far, I am enjoying using Sprout Social. In another post or posts I will look at other features, especially Scheduler and Discovery.

As mentioned above, I’m hoping also to have a look at the other types of account than the basic Pro I’ve been using.

Filed Under: Social Media Tagged With: analytics, Facebook, impressions, social media management tools, Sprout Social, Twitter

Six Key Social Platforms for Busy Professionals

April 2, 2012 By Des Walsh 4 Comments

Too many platforms, too little time

Long ago I lost count of all the possible social media platforms and tools a business might reasonably use. And in my email and on various newsfeeds I see more new ones being announced or talked about every day.

That proliferation of possibilities probably helps explain why for many professionals the topic of social media brings on an immediate sense of overwhelm. There’s just too much going on, with too many different social platforms.

The temptation is to just put off or ignore the whole topic and maybe hope things will settle down enough one day to a point where some sense can be made of it all.

Let’s face it: that day is not going to come, not in the foreseeable future anyway. We have to make the best decisions we can in a sea of activity and uncertainty.

Or miss out on how business is increasingly being done.

I understand the sense of overwhelm and I experience it too in my own attempts to keep track of new developments so that I can better advise my clients.

Cutting through the sense of overwhelm

In this post I’m providing an overview of what I see as a basic suite of platforms for just about any business to consider, especially in the broad field of professional services.

Each of us needs to make sense of both the big picture of social media and the details of what technologies are right for us to employ in our business or professional practice.

Which is why, for a while now, I’ve been including in my presentations on the topic some discussion about basic platforms.

By the way, I’ve noticed each time that, even with a variety of audiences, this part of the presentation seems to get extra engagement from most or all present. That tells me it strikes a chord of interest.

A basic suite of social platforms

I’ve also noticed lately that even when I have reduced the list of basic platforms to six it’s still overwhelming for some. So I have been emphasizing that I don’t recommend trying to operate them all at once. That way would lie untold frustration and probably disillusion with the whole process. In fact, I’ve been saying that it makes better sense to develop understanding and skill with one platform at a time.

The six platforms I recommend are, not in any intrinsic order of priority:

LinkedIn
Twitter
Facebook
Google+
Blog
YouTube

LinkedIn is indisputably the first platform of choice for professionals, whatever the industry. It’s more fundamentally a professional networking site than a “social” networking one, has over 150 million users and is still growing.

Twitter, the instant messaging and social networking site where your message can’t be more than 140 characters in length, is seriously underestimated by many, maybe most of the professionals I meet. Others make very effective use of it, as part of their social media strategy.

Facebook, the social networking phenomenon with somewhere over 850 million users, can’t be ignored by anyone in business – or should I say simply “by anyone”. Just how effective it will be for specific businesses is a subject that needs attention when developing a company-specific social strategy.

Google+ (or Google Plus) is a newer social networking platform but growing: launched in June 2011, by the end of the year it had 90 million users. There has been vigorous debate, via blogs and various online forums, about whether Google+ will be a success or whether, as one seminar participant asked me the other day, it is or is becoming a “deserted village”. I’m bullish about Google+, especially because of the launch in January this year of Google plus your world.

A Blog is often the missing element in a business’s social media setup, which in my view is a big mistake, especially for a solo professional wanting to be noticed above th din and wanting to do that economically in dollar terms.

YouTube, the video sharing site with some 60 hours of video being uploaded every minute, provides a very accessible way for any of us to get our message out and is a seriously underutilized resource for many businesses.

Social integration

Thinking strategically, it’s not enough to just build our presence on each of the basic platforms. We need to work out which ones we will put more or less emphasis on, depending on our initial and ongoing strategic assessment.

We also need to take care of social integration, the business of linking our various social presences to get a greater effect for our efforts. It’s something that is often overlooked by professionals who may have quite a good presence across specific platforms.

Username parking

One clarification is needed on the topic of getting used to one platform at a time, then moving on to the next, and that is the necessity to take care early on of some “username parking”. It’s a process similar to that of “domain parking”, in which you register domains (web addresses) for your business or specific brands so as to ensure someone else doesn’t have them, even if you don’t have any immediate plan to use them for a specific site. Basically you are establishing or refreshing an account on a specific platform so as to reserve your ideal username (provided someone else hasn’t got there first).

YMMV

As we used to say in forums, your mileage may vary. If you have a different list of basic platforms, I’d be interested to hear about that, including if you wish the reasons for your choice.

Filed Under: Social Media Tagged With: basic social media platforms, blog, Facebook, Google Plus, LinkedIn, social media strategy, Twitter, YouTube

Why I Do Not Tweet About Politics

April 29, 2011 By Des Walsh

In a social media workshop recently I shared that while I am keenly interested in politics, I choose for business reasons not to buy into political topics on Twitter.

The comment at the time was an add on to the workshop, not part of what I’d prepared.

Since then, I have asked myself just what my rationale is for that stance. This post attempts to tease that out a bit.

First off, it’s not that I think business and politics are mutually exclusive. Far from it.

For me it’s more that I feel that if I tweet on political issues of the day I’m not going to do the right thing by my business brand, which is apolitical.

I think it is also relevant that, given the 140 character format, I don’t feel confident about having the sort of more in-depth political discussion I like to have,

There are other considerations which have helped entrench my decision not to use my @deswalsh Twitter account for political comments. One is that I have a lot of American followers and I am conscious there is much that I don’t know about the realities of US politics: and what I might have to say about Australian politics, where I am well informed, will I’m pretty sure not generally be of interest to people outside the country.

In that light, I don’t feel it’s good practice for me to even indulge in the odd throwaway political tweet (although I think I may have done that a few times now).

But fundamentally it’s about keeping my business brand apolitical.

I know I could set up another Twitter account where I could tweet away on politics, although I don’t feel a compulsion to do that and would not feel comfortable doing that anonymously. And if I made it clear that the new Twitter account was mine, I could see branding issues again.

I don’t feel deprived about all of this. I’m sure there are plenty of online forums where I could share my political views and have discussions about politics, without being too concerned about the brand implications.

Just not on Twitter.

And not on this blog.

Same basic principle: it’s about the brand.

Care to share your views, your practice on this topic?

Image credit: vote here door, by aprilzosia CC license by-sa 2.0, via Flickr

Filed Under: Social Media Tagged With: political, politics, Twitter

Social Media Tune Up: Twitter Part 4, Hashtags

January 10, 2011 By Des Walsh

In my update last week on the Social Media Tune Up series, I promised another in the sub-series on Twitter, to look at hashtags (#) and lists.

Hashtags and lists are features of using Twitter which help explain to the interested enquirer why there is far more to Twitter and Twitterville than people sharing breakfast experiences. And why any serious social media strategy for business will almost certainly include provision for the business in question to have a presence of some kind on Twitter.

But rather than trying to cover both items, hashtags and lists, in the one post I’ve decided it makes more sense to do two separate posts, this one to be on hashtags and one to follow on lists.

What are hashtags?

The simple hashtag functions with fascinating efficiency as an organizing and navigational tool for Twitter users, along with the @ symbol, used to tag account holders, mainly people (mine is @deswalsh) and companies or organizations (Social Media Club Gold Coast is @smcgc).

At the simplest level, a Twitter hashtag is a word preceded by the # (hash or pound) sign. The “word” can be two or more words run together, such “blog + chat” as #blogchat, used to point most notably to a weekly live Twitter chat session about blogging, hosted by @MackCollier.

The hashtag allows any number of “tweets” about a topic or an event to be grouped together.

It can be used for an event, not just on Twitter and not even just online. @MariSmith in her excellent video on hashtags gives the example #asw09 for the event she was attending at the time, the Affiliate Marketing Summit 2009.

It is quite common now for conferences, especially those which have a social media emphasis, to have a conference hashtag and even for individual sessions to have their own hashtags. It’s also not unusual at such events to have a screen at the front of the room dedicated to showing the “tweetstream” with the session hashtag. That practice raises a whole other discussion about how the presenter or presenters handle that kind of live interaction: a subject for another post.

How do I find a hashtag stream?

It’s not difficult to find a hashtag stream. Here are some basic ways:

a) Go to search.twitter.com and insert the hashtag you want in the search box

In this example, I searched on #blogchat. Note that although this week’s #blogchat event had ended formally some nine hours previously, there were quite fresh tweets: that illustrates the fact that no one controls how often or with what frequency a hashtag is used.

b) Use a service like Tweetchat to list a hashtag stream

Again I’ve used #blogchat to illustrate. Note that, as in this instance I signed in to my free Tweetchat account it provides a field for me to add directly to the hashtag stream if I so choose. Because it is a dedicated service, I don’t need to add the hashtag: in fact, if I do the tweet will show up with the #blogchat hashtag twice. This means a service like Tweetchat can help me participate more efficiently in a tweet chat session. I can also use Tweetchat without signing in: it will then just provide the chat stream, without the field enabling me to participate directly from Tweetchat.

Another service mentioned by Mari Smith in the video linked above, is Twemes.

c) Use a dashboard service like Hootsuite, Tweetdeck or Seesmic

In Hootsuite, for example, I clicked on the + Add Stream tab in the menu bar at the top of the screen, entered the #blogchat and a new column was added, dedicated to the #blogchat stream.

Managing a hashtag chat

What the Hashtag? is a very useful tool for managing a hashtag chat. You register your hashtag-referenced event and What the Hashtag provides supporting documentation. As the screenshot shows, this includes a graph and specific statistics of participation, a transcript (very handy for participants and people who were not available at the time), an ordered list of those who tweeted most during the session.

Roll your own

You can make your own hashtag, whether for an event or for a topic of discussion.

For example, the other day I tweeted about the bizarre experience of seeing hot cross buns, traditionally associated with Easter, appearing in our local supermarket just two weeks after Christmas Day. I used the hashtag #whatpricetradition. So far only two other people have used it, but who knows, someone may tweet about some other departure from tradition and use the hashtag. I don’t own it and it may well never be used again.

Although you can “make your own” hashtag, as I say it’s not really your own.

Accordingly, as you have no exclusive right to a hashtag, don’t be surprised if you get tweets appearing which have no real connection with the topic or event. Spammers will also intrude from time to time: by using the hashtag they get their spammy messages into the hashtag stream. Often in a discussion some one or more people will make it very clear to the spammers that they and their spammy messages are unwelcome.

It’s not all about branding and marketing

I found this morning an interesting example of using hashtags creatively, outside the branding and marketing fields which seem to dominate a lot of discussion about social media. It was from the education field and illustrates a way for hashtags to be used to help teachers do their job more efficiently and effectively.

Thirty hashtags are listed, in the post Top Twitter Hashtags for Teachers, on the UK-based Creative Education Blog, with an invitation to readers to add more.

Summing up

Hashtags are a very handy tool for curating discussions and helping with the organization of, promotion for and management of events and for follow up after the event.

If you have any examples of how hashtags have helped your business or career, or helped you build connections or learn new things, please share with us in the comments.

Image credit: “Hashtags” by halfbrown, via Flickr, Creative Commons

Filed Under: Social Media Tagged With: hashtags, Hootsuite, Mari Smith, Social Media, tweetchat, Twitter, twitter search, What the Hashtag

Social Media Tune Up 2011

January 6, 2011 By Des Walsh

Last year I started a project I thought would be fairly straightforward, a social media tune up. It proved to be a more challenging task than I’d envisaged.

The intention was to go systematically through my main platform-basedsocial media presences, with the aim of refining and generally improving what was there.

Although I thought the project would be straightforward, the aim was not unambitious and I was keen to get on with it.

I would go steadily through the key platforms and reinvigorate them, one by one.

I listed them thus:

Twitter
LinkedIn
Facebook
Delicious
This blog, Des Walsh dot Com
Flickr
RSS Feeds – mainly my BlogBridge account

I believe my at least subconscious expectation at that time was that I would have them all done by no later than the end of the year.

The actual result was more modest.

Actually, it was pathetic. Three posts about Twitter.

I believe they were good posts, with helpful information for others.

Trouble is, at that rate it was going to take another year, or maybe two, to complete the Tune Up.

And in fact the third post about Twitter promised a fourth, possibly but not necessarily the last in that sub-series. I’m intending to get around to that soon.

But what to do about the bigger project, the overall tune up?

Well, it’s the New Year isn’t it? And what with everyone forming good intentions and making resolutions, it seems like a good idea to re-focus and get this sucker done – preferably much sooner than the end of this year, let alone next year!

The difference is that this time I will be more aware that tuning up my presence on each platform may take a bit longer than I expect.

First I’ll do that fourth post on Twitter, mainly about hashtags (#) and lists.

Then I’ll do one on using dashboards, especially Hootsuite and TweetDeck, to streamline my participation on various platforms, especially Twitter.

I intend then to jump to Facebook, with some attention to sorting out how best to use my Facebook Profile and Pages.

I’ll report here as I go.

Should keep me busy.

From my experience so far the project will also help to keep me honest. Giving advice to others about using social media, I value the reality checks I get when I work like this on my own social media presence. Note I’m not saying I enjoy the reality checks, but I do value them.

Filed Under: Social Media Tagged With: Social Media, tune up, Twitter