If you’re engaged in any way with your consumer, the chances are you’re plugged in to social media. But how effective have your efforts been? Is your content relevant? Giles Palmer, CEO of social media analytics company Brandwatch, gives us the four essential steps for putting together a useful social media report.
As consumer social media use has proliferated, so too has the number of businesses trying to take advantage of the channel. Many do so under the limited belief that social media is just another great channel with which to communicate with their target audience.
What these companies are failing to see however is the huge potential offered by these channels as a source of data. Far from being just a communications channel, social media, when analysed properly, can give companies real, actionable insights for their business.
Social media monitoring has become an important part of not only understanding consumers’ behaviour, thoughts and ideas, but gaining insight into established and emerging markets through how people are discussing a certain topic or brand online.
Often however, the type and amount of data made available through social media monitoring can feel overwhelming, so how do you make it actionable and relevant?
Writing reports from social media data is our bread and butter here at Brandwatch so we thought we could share our four step guide to ensuring a successful outcome.
Step 1: starting out
When creating a social media report the first thing you have to ask yourself is what type of insight will be most valuable for your business. Do you need to see how your brand is perceived, are you looking at a competitor or are you looking at an industry trend? Why are you producing a report in the first place?
We would also recommend you consider the following additional points before you start:
Who: What your report shows and explores will differ according to who is going to be reading it.
What: If the scope of your report is too broad, it will be very difficult to get interesting insights from the data. A generic goal will make it very difficult to produce an interesting report. For example, setting the question “is there demand for bacon flavoured ice cream?” will yield a much clearer answer than “what do people think about bacon ice cream?” Monitoring tools can provide you with lots and lots of data but without any direction as to what you want that data to answer, it can be very difficult to segment and understand.
When: What date range do you want to look at? Have you a specific period in mind? Whatever the case, make sure it’s a long enough period to make the results representative. We find that a date range of 3-6 months is usually sufficient, though sometimes we look at a year if we are analysing long-term trends.
Where: Do you want mentions from across the world? From a specific market? From a specific website or group of sites?
Once you’ve considered all of the above, write it all up into a clear brief.
Step 2: the data quest
Once you’ve written your brief, the next step is to collect the data you want. This is done through writing queries.
Getting your query right is perhaps the most important part in the whole process; it is what everything else in your report is based on. Come up with an ineffective query and you will get bad, irrelevant and useless data.
Some queries are very simple: if you are searching for a brand or product with a very distinctive name (Nescafe, say, or Logitech), then clearly this is going to be much simpler than trying to search for the brand Orange or Boots.
You need to make sure that your query is as clear as possible and that the word(s) that you are searching for cannot be understood within any another context. The risk otherwise is that you pull out a large amount of unspecified data. With our examples you would therefore need to specify ‘the phone network Orange’ or ‘the pharmacy Boots’.
Bear in mind that there is no such thing as a perfect query, but you should be aiming for roughly 90% or above accuracy.
Step 3: data, data everywhere. Now what?
The next step you’ll need to take is to segment your data to get some juicy insights. It’s a good idea to familiarise yourself with the data a little first, so browse through the mentions to get a feel for the conversation.
It’s normal to have preconceived ideas about what the data is going to show, but try to keep an open mind. You should find from reading mentions that certain topics or trends emerge regularly. Use this insight, along with your brief, to decide how to segment your data – this could be by topic, brand, author type, mention type and so on.
You can then manually categorise your mentions by looking at a sample (400 mentions is the magic number for accuracy), or use rules to categorise them if the topic allows it.
Step 4: analyse, analyse, analyse
Now that you have a clean data set you can begin to answer the initial brief. Some common ways to report on the data are:
Volume over time
Volume by site type
Top sites
Volume by category
Sentiment by category
When you are writing up your analysis, always keep in mind the ‘so what?’ question. It is not enough to show what the data is saying; you also have to translate these findings into what it means for your brand or business. You should try to make sure you are answering the questions posed in your initial brief, but equally don’t be afraid to work outside of the brief if you discover something interesting.
Ultimately the efficiency of the report will depend on the ability of its writer to extract meaningful insights from raw data but hopefully following the outlined steps will put that writer on the right path.
About the author
Joel is the marketing manager for EMEA at social listening vendor Brandwatch, where he spearheads efforts across the marketing mix in Europe, helping to drive growth to one of the most exciting tech companies in the world.
From humble beginnings in Brighton, Brandwatch has grown by over 100% for five years running, with a current workforce of over 250 staff helping serve over 1,000 clients including British Airways, Verizon, Papa John’s, Sky, Pepsico and Whirlpool.
Joel’s background is in community management, journalism and gaming; a career that has included contributing to sites like the Guardian and Bloomberg, appearing on the BBC and the Wall Street Journal and speaking at dozens of prestigious events around the world.
