Facebook Insights

To prepare for our final presentation this week, I figured I might as well go directly to the source to see what kind of analysis Facebook could provide.  At the top of the page you can see that we have a total of 115 likes.  You can also see that we have 54,854???  I have no idea what this number is.  Surely it can’t be total people who have seen our page.  I have found that on Facebook there are quite a few statistics which I believe there is voodoo math behind.

 

The chart to the left shows the  peaks and the lulls (of our posts and our followers engagement).More specifically it shows our posts, the # of people talking about our posts and the weekly reach.  Although this chart provides a nice little activity summary, it doesn’t provide you with enough information to assess the strength of your campaign.  However, it does clearly show the relationship between posts, virality and reach.  As you can see, we practically dropped off the radar around 4/21 but after posting a few more items we were able to increase engagement again.

Next, I took a closer look at the analysis of the content we posted.  We were always trying to figure out what content people would want to get engaged with.  People liked the pictures of the cute puppies and kitties, but most people didn’t like them enough to want to share the post with their friends or make comments directly on our page.  When looking at the posts which had higher virality than others, there really was no common thread.  Yes most of the pictures which were shared did have cute animals in them (as did most of our posts) but there was no smoking gun to be found based on this analysis.  The most useful part of the post analytics page was that you could click on the bullhorn to easily promote a particular post.

Finally, we looked at fan demographics.  It was no surprise that 56% of our fans are female (thanks Evan!) and that most of our fans live in the Seattle area.  It is interesting that we have 1 follower in Canada and 1 in Nigeria, but again – not all that useful to know..

To sum up my experience with Facebook analytics, I found it useful as a high-level tool but it didn’t give me the deeper level of understanding which may have helped us increase fan engagement.  As a free tool, it was sufficient for my needs but I definitely wouldn’t pay for it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

HootSuite

My first thought was – you have got to be kidding me!  This dashboard is like mission control for someone with a job in social media. With Hootsuite you can set up various streams for social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare, WordPress, mixi, and yes – they even have MySpace!  Once you have added a social network to your account, you can easily click through the various tabs to see all of your social media activity (in real-time) at a glance.  You can see your news feed, mentions, wall posts, sent tweets, events and just about any other type of activity you would have for any of the social networks.

In addition to being able to see all of your social media content from a single site, another advantage of Hootsuite is that it allows you to schedule messages to be sent out.  Simply schedule it and forget about it!  This is sounding more and more like my kind of tool.  Yet, I don’t know when the best time to schedule my message is.  If this tool has all my social media history, why can’t it tell me when to send out my updates so I can get the largest possible reach?  Now that would be a useful feature!

Hootsuite also offers analytics.  Now, I must confess that I am only using the free version of the program so unfortunately I don’t get the reports with all the bells & whistles.  However, I was not terribly impressed with the reports that I could gain access to.  It seemed like there were a lot of reports specific to Twitter and I could also get access to Facebook Insights (which I can already access through FB) so I’m not really sure how valuable these reports are.  Seems like it would be more helpful to have a consolidated view showing highlights of all your social media channels combined.  This could help tell you which channels may need more focus.

In short, this tool does have some useful features (aggregation of social network feeds + message scheduling), but I think it still has a ways to go to before it could become the de facto standard for social media  publishing AND analysis.

PLEASE READ: Breaking News About Slalom’s Future

This was the subject line of the email that I saw when I checked my email on my Windows Phone on Monday morning.  After the immediate “oh shit” moment had passed, I proceeded to read the email.  Hmm… not many details to be found in the body of the email itself, so with a growing sense of trepidation I decided to click on the link to watch an important video message from our national general manager.  I’m not going to ruin the surprise, but let’s just say that the video message was not at all what I was expecting.  It was posted on YouTube.  Not really the type of channel you would expect to find an important corporate announcement.  Since the time of the posting the YouTube video has been viewed 1,786 times. Given that we have roughly 2000 consultants across North America – these stats aren’t too shabby.  As a Slalom employee, I am impressed by the innovative ways our leadership team tries to connect with employees and customers.  I was surprised to see that we had 43 other videos posted on YouTube.

In addition to YouTube, Slalom is very active on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.  It seems like new content is being published every week.  And, it’s not lame content either. It’s content that I actually WANT to read.  The topic of Tuesday’s post was how to build strategy maps that work.  The previous week was about how change is good.  Through social media Slalom is finding a new channel to educate employees and demonstrate value to customers.  Now, if only we could get a few more “likes” on our Facebook page we could hit the 1000 mark!

Be sure to check out the video if you’d like to see what the breaking news was all about.