Posts Tagged ‘analytics’
Facebook introduces a subscription button, while Twitter launches analytics
September 15th, 2011
The giants of social networking have been busy this week with the launch of new features which will prove useful, and change the focus and reporting for digital campaigns.
First to Facebook, which announced the Subscription button yesterday. This allows users to choose exactly what they see in their news feed, both in terms of narrowing the noise from friends and expanding subscriptions beyond friends to include contacts of interest, e.g. journalists, political figures, bloggers etc.
From a marketing perspective it will place further emphasis (if any was needed) on quality and useful content that can be subscribed to, even if pages are not liked and individuals followed.
The total number of people subscribing to posts and the number of people you’re subscribed to will appear on your profile. Facebook has also confirmed that the subscribers tab will replace ‘likes’ as the most accurate engagement indicator, which will change the focus of many Facebook campaigns and again reflects the push towards being useful rather than just popular.
You can read the full update from Zach Rait who posted on the Facebook blog yesterday and Mashable has also posted on the launch.
In brief, Facebook says: “In the next few days, you’ll start seeing this button (the Subscribe button) on friends’ and others’ profiles. You can use it to:”
1. Choose what you see from people in News Feed
2. Hear from people, even if you’re not friends
3. Let people hear from you, even if you’re not friends
Over to Twitter, where Twitter Web Analytics is now being introduced.
Christopher Golda at Twitter posted about the launch on Tuesday, confirming:
“Today we’re announcing Twitter Web Analytics, a tool that helps website owners understand how much traffic they receive from Twitter and the effectiveness of Twitter integrations on their sites. Twitter Web Analytics was driven by the acquisition of BackType, which we announced in July.”
The product provides three key benefits:
• Understand how much your website content is being shared across the Twitter network
• See the amount of traffic Twitter sends to your site
• Measure the effectiveness of your Tweet Button integration
The tool will allow brands to understand how website content is being shared across the Twitter network and view the amount of traffic Twitter sends to a site.
Golda continued:“People have struggled to accurately measure the amount of traffic Twitter is sending to their websites, in part because web analytics software hasn’t evolved as quickly as online sharing and social signals.
“Twitter Web Analytics will be rolled out this week to a small pilot group of partners, and will be made available to all website owners within the next few weeks. We’re also committed to releasing a Twitter Web Analytics API for developers interested in incorporating Twitter data in their products.”
This will be a hugely useful tool for the digital marketing industry as it offers a standardised, if basic, insight into Twitter analytics for all. Twitter has also recognised that it must open up to existing analytics providers to be successful.
Is marketing evolving through social media?
August 11th, 2011
Two opposing pieces focused on social media understanding within the marketing sector caught my attention earlier this month.
Allow me to set the scene, the following piece was published on the Telegraph’s site on August 1st: ‘Businesses still don’t ‘get’ social media - and it’s 40-year-old marketing directors that are to blame.‘ By Alexis Dormandy, of LoveThis.com
Here’s a snippet to whet your appetite:
“Our 40-year-old marketing director probably spent four years at an agency, before going to work on the client side. They spent the 1990s pulling together billboard campaigns, debating what they could say with the Advertising Standards Authority, agreeing joint promotions with other big businesses, and sponsoring celebrity sportsman. Life was still a lot of fun.
“They turned 30, the dot-com bubble came, and a small number of the more enterprising ones became entrepreneurs. Most kept rising up their businesses, learning to take eighteen months to launch a consumer product, and working with retailers to plan their Christmas sales nine months in advance. The really good ones rose to the top and had teams to look after all this stuff for them.”
Although obviously designed to be controversial, the article sparked some good debate, well in the main (see the comments on the Telegraph piece, some of which were not really about debate). However, one of the best reaction pieces was by Gordon MacMillan at Brand Republic: Are Generation X’s class of marketing directors to blame for businesses failing to get social media?
In his piece, Gordon opened up the requirements for a marketing director, confirming: “While he (Alexis) makes some interesting points, I’m sure he’s wrong. Marketing isn’t about analytics, maths and measurement. It is about ideas. Sure you have to understand all of the above, but being brilliant at understanding analytics is not going to help produce great marketing.”
I tend to agree with Gordon here, Alexis’ piece makes some strong points, and to be fair his piece starts off by focusing on social commerce, and in that case, analytics is crucial to deliver sales. However, marketing, or social media for that matter, is not just about, or mainly about, maths. Nor is it focused purely on data and analytical dissection of your audience.
Yes, I completely agree measurement and analytics is a hugely important part of the mix, and researching and understanding the brand’s community is the foundation for any campaign, combined with constant monitoring, measurement and evolution based on the numbers. However, although the importance of analytics and audience research has increased, it’s certainly not a new tactic, which is where I think the argument fails, are we really saying marketing campaigns did not employ market research and analytical measurement strategies 20 years ago?
I’m the first to agree the marketing landscape has changed, but the main point for me is not that we’ve just changed from long term campaigns to listening and engaging immediately, although that is true. It’s not that we just need great ideas, although again that’s part of it, and it’s not about the maths. The main issue is that we can’t live in our previously disparate and comfortable marketing specialisms, because the barriers have been blurring for so long that they are practically non-existent.
In-house marketers need to have a good understanding of the full range of marketing strategies, and to some degree, the possible tactics as well. As Gordon says, yes you can hire agencies to help with specific knowledge, and of course I support that, but the agencies are having to be more generalist as well.
The simple economic reason for this is: why would a client pay for three or four agencies to cover a range of specialisms (e.g. search, social, PR and web dev) when one can do them all - and do them better and more coherently without the painful time management required to bring agencies together?
That’s without even getting into the complementary nature of these services.
At Liberate Media, we experience a full range of enquires in terms of their understanding of social and how it should be utilised as part of any campaign. We have social-savvy clients that are fully immersed personally, through to RFPs from those that just want ‘some social media‘ because their boss or competitor mentioned it. This situation has improved dramatically over the last five years and today we are getting smarter briefs and better questions, and I expect that to continue developing.
I agree that the world of marketing has changed, and I think it’s a great change, and honestly believe marketing of the past was really advertising in disguise, as we were telling people what they need, not asking them what they want. Today we are truly grasping the meaning of marketing and evolving that role. Today we are able to call in specific and useful tools to assist in practically every element of our jobs, but the understanding across the board, the knowledge of what our customers want and how we can help them by being useful is the key for me. The maths, ideas and other elements are pieces of that puzzle, and to be successful we must solve it all.
I do however agree with the Telegraph piece that the social media managers of today will inherit the earth, or at least have the understanding, cross-discipline skills and versatility to have a bright future!
Social media tools list - from analytics to Digg
February 20th, 2008
After recently attending the Chinwag: measuring social media event, I wanted to share with you some of the hundreds of mostly free measurement, tracking, conversation, monitoring tools and so on that are out there and widely available. All of which can be found on our archived research page , which is there for all to use to better understand social media and related subjects.
The first link is a Mashables page where you will find tools for web traffic visualisation, blog and RSS feed analysis, market research data and site rankings, analytics software packages and log file analysis.
The next link is 26 must-have buzz monitoring tools, all of which are free of charge.
For the PR readers of the blog here are some tools for you that have been tried and tested by PR consultant David Jones.
If you are a big fan of DEL.ICIO.US as we are here at Liberate, here’s another one for you. The ultimate DEL.ICIO.US TOOLBOX - over 180 DEL.ICIO.US tools to use. Check out our own bookmarks at http://del.icio.us/liberatemedia
By now you should all be digging and submitting story you like to Digg. To keep on top of it all here is a Digg tools and resource page.
If that wasn’t enough for you here’s 70 more Digg tools.
Want to track your website? Well you should! On this page there are 69 tools to do just that.
If you just want to concentrate on blogs here are some tracking tools and six key ways to measure it.
If you have a found a discussion in the bloggosphere and you want to follow it try one of the following tools.
Twitter is very popular at the moment and numbers 4 and 5 in this blog post will help you monitor conversations and visualisation.
More reputation and social media tactics tools can be be found in our rescource.
If you would like to add to our resource or think we might have missed some important tools please get in touch.