It’s great to see Insights that data can uncover. I saw a nice insight in a report I read about Analyzing customer acquisition channels for e-commerce sites and in this blog post, I am sharing it with you. So what are the top customer acquisition channels for Commerce sites? The Top channels are Organic Search, Emails & Paid Search.Here’s the report: E-Commerce Customer Acquisition Snapshot
It was not surprising to me to see Organic Search and Emails being among the Top customer acquisition channels but what surprised me was relatively poor performance of social media in acquiring customers. Here’s the chart showing performance of various online channels for acquiring customers:
Note #1: The post is NOT about devaluing the benefits of social media and it comes to down to understanding the goals of having a social media presence in the first place. While computing the ROI of social media, there are other factors like increased brand awareness, customer loyalty to be considered. But I posted this data because it’s a great way to show how data can uncover insights and sometimes it may surprise you
Note #2: The percentage of customers acquired does not add up to 100% for a year because the data does not include things like direct traffic. The author of the report confirmed it over an email w/ me.
That’s about it for this post. Your comments are very welcome!
Data integrity is important especially if critical business decisions are based off on data. To that extent, in this post, I’ll write about five data collection tips to help you have accurate data for “social media analytics”. So here are the tips that are applicable to social media analytics irrespective of the tool you are using:
1. Social Media Platform
Select the right social media platform for capturing data. You do not want to select few such that you miss data.And you do want to select irrelevant social media platforms because if you do, then you’ll introduce noise in the data. Let me take an example. If your project needs to be based on USA only then you do not need to add “sina weibo” (Chinese social network) in your social media sources.
Now, Based on your business need for “social media analytics” campaign, you should test all possible social media platforms – you never know who might be talking about things that you are interested in. After you have selected the right social media platforms for your project, let’s go the next step:
2. “Search Keyword” Selection
Some of the social media platforms let’s you collect data via “search keywords”. Like twitter allows you to collect data via “hashtags” and/or keywords. So if you want to collect data about all social media posts having “american airlines” then you should not collect data using:
AMERICAN OR Airlines:
If you select the above rule, then it will introduce a LOT of noise because we’ll collect data people talking about just “American” PLUS data about people talking about just “airlines”. That’s bad! What you want is rules like these:
1. American AND airlines
2. “American Airlines” (as a phrase)
Now, I can’t stress the importance of selecting the right search keywords enough. Choosing wrong keywords will add noise that would be bad for analytics. So choose keywords such that you are not adding noise as well as not missing on conversations. There’s no secret formula here, continuous improvement is the way to go!
3. Language & country Filtering
Social networks are GLOBAL in nature and so it’s important to filter (or include) based on the project that you’re working on. Not doing so would add noise in your data. And also remember to include country and language because you do not want to miss out on conversations either.
Conclusion:
Three Data Collection Tips for Social media analytics that I shared in this post are:
This is Guest Blog by Jugal Shah. Jugal is pursuing MBA w/ focus on Marketing from a premier university in India. He shares his views on marketing, sales and strategy via his Blog & Facebook.In this post, He briefly comments on “How to measure Social Media Marketing ROI”.
Jugal Shah’s Short post on Measuring Social Media Marketing ROI:
In social media marketing, ROI is not in just monitory terms. So, for social media ROI, my focus would be on 1) to how many people I have reached 2) How many people I have engaged through online activities 3) Becoming a conversation enabler and perception driver
Then focus on
1) how much increased revenue is due to social media reach (you can do this by tracking referred link) 2) How many leads you generated through social media 3) How social media efforts helped to resolve customer query/problems and led to more customer satisfaction (remember customer acquisition cost 10 times more than customer retention cost).
In a nutshell, It’s of utmost important to use Social Media as:
conversation enabler
perception driver
customer retention
Conclusion:
Paras: Jugal, Thanks for this post. I am sure, this short post would be a great food for thought for readers who are interested in Digital Marketing Analytics or analytics in general. Readers, Feel free to reach out to him on his blog and/or Facebook page.
The success of companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Netflix, not to mention Wall Street firms and industries from manufacturing to retail and healthcare, is increasingly driven by better tools for extracting meaning from very large quantities of data,” says Tim O’Reilly
Resource: Presentations from the Sentiment Analysis Symposium http://bit.ly/VtPH3B
If I switched to the newest “holiday” theme on WordPress, this is how it would look: http://on.fb.me/UEuyFr
Nice! Code School now has R programming language! I have been playing with R for a while now and definitely want to learn more – here’s the link to learn R: http://bit.ly/VEAnkZ
Interesting tool from Google to optimize and analyze web page speeds: http://bit.ly/HTubNC
Performed #sentiment #Analysis on #starbucks twitter data using #R ! It was fun! http://on.fb.me/Z3qLo8
In 2002: The Data Warehousing Institute estimates that data quality problems cost U.S. businesses more than $600 billion a year. And of course, over the past 10 years, this number would be bigger. http://bit.ly/TPT9r3
Some time back, I wanted to search one of my own social network post. It was a resource I had shared and somehow I was not able to “google” it (again). I eventually found it – but it took me 15 odd minutes to scroll down to my twitter feed. It was NOT fun! And I thought to myself – there’s got to be a better way! And I thought – It’ll be great if I solve it for not just Twitter but all my social network activities that includes LinkedIn, Facebook Pages, Google+. So here’s couple of things thats working for me, I hope it helps someone out there too:
Now, before we begin when I say “Searchable” – I mean searchable by YOU (or a human being) and not necessarily search engines. But it turns out, both my ideas increase your chances of getting your social media activities Indexed! With that, Here are the ideas:
1) Syndicate your Social Network Activities (Posts/Images/Updates) to Tumblr/Blogger
I use IFTTT to syndicate my Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn activities to Blogger
2) Create a post about your social network activities on your blog:
Though Idea #2’s main goal is to keep my blog readers updated about my social network activities – But it also acts as a good way to make my social media posts “searchable”.
And remember I said earlier that the chances of your social network posts getting indexed by search engines increases? That’s because WordPress, Tumblr & Blogger’s posts are accessible by Google (unless you choose to block it). So that’s about it for this post. If you like the idea(s), please let me know! And if you have other ideas – also let me know, I am always looking for ways to make my social media activities easily searchable to me as well as for anyone else.
Let’s connect and converse on any of these people networks!
I am fairly active on social network channels. I engage with people on Social networks and I thought It would be great if my blog readers also get a recap of conversations I am having on different social networks and so I’ve thought of compiling a “Things I shared on Social Media networks during the week” . Here is the recap for the week of OCT 3 – OCT 10:
1. Gaurang Patel commented about the Blog: “Five things I like about RescueTime” on FB page: i am using this one it is really fantastic .
5. “I was working on Business Intelligence project requirement analysis. One requirement that I saw across all department: Need a data mart (single version of truth)”
Check the end of this post to see how RescueTime user @Paras_Doshi was able to cut his social networking time in half! http://buff.ly/PlQfdg
8. SolidQ shared this post: “Earlier Today: delivered a two-hour session on PowerPivot and Power View to a client. they had some very Interesting questions for their scenario!”
Data Visualization: Created HeatMap/TreeMap like the one shown below for a client. Looking forward to receiving their feedback. btw, I used the Black, Grey and white for the shades. image courtesy: http://www.labescape.com/info/articles/what-is-a-heat-map.html
Let’s connect and converse on any of these people networks!
I figured a way to add External Links to my Facebook Page – In this blog-post I’ll share how I did that. It’s not a native feature and I have resorted to a third-party app to get this functionality. Here’s the Blog-Post:
This is how my Facebook page Tabs looks after I completed the process.
You can see it is linked to my Blog, Twitter and Google+ from my Facebook page tab.
Before we start. you should have the proper admin permissions to install app to a Facebook page as we are going to use a third-party app for this blog-post. Here are the steps involved:
2) select the Facebook Page and click on add page tab
3) Authorize Tab application (review the permission requests before agreeing)
4) Can you see the Tab Settings Page?
*NGO XYZ is just a page that I created to show this. Ignore the phrase when you see that.
5) I want to redirect it to say twitter.com/paras_doshi.
So following are the settings that I chose:
Tab Name: Twitter
Page Source: redirect
And I entered the URL that It will get redirected to:
6) I am going to leave other choice as default for now. You could explore it for advanced options like “this tab will only be visible to your fans and invisible to your non-fans” among other things.
click on Save Settings.
7) Can you see the new tab?
8) Test it!
9) Come back on your page. Now – Don’t you want to change the Image? Yes? Go to Edit settings for this Tab:
10) click on “change” for custom tab image. And Now, upload the custom image.
When done – come back to your page. Can you see it? yes? Great!
11) To add more Tabs. click on this tab as “page administrator”
when prompted about “Do you want to be redirected?”. click on cancel
click on settings from the admin tab options.
and another tab:
Limit seems to 10 tabs.
And once you click on “HTML Page Tab #n”, then you’ll have to repeat the steps about configuring the settings for this tab.
That’s about it!
Conclusion:
If you want your Facebook page to point to your (or your organizations) presence on other social media networks – then now you know how you can add external links and point your Facebook page fans to Google+, Twitter, Website, Blog among other things.
Are there any other cool facebook page techniques that you now of, I’ll be glad to learn about it – Please do post it in the comment section (along with your facebook page url! )
Now, Be a Kid – explore this Dashboard – see what else you’ve got: Likes Metrics, Reach Metrics, Talking about this Metric. There’s interesting Demographic information on each of the mentioned metrics. For instance I know that 60% of my fans are from India. Any-who this post is not about delving into what is available but it is about something that is not available via this Dashboard.
So Now I had this Question: What kind of post should I post more to get more likes/shares/comments? Should I post Images? Should I share Interesting Links? Thus, I wanted to know: For a Facebook page – which post-type is better at getting more Likes + Shares + comments
So as a Data Guy – since they didn’t provide that insight – I thought of a way to get it. Here’s how you can do that too in a step by step fashion:
Tool Used: Excel 2010
Step 1.
On your Facebook Page Insights Dashboard – Do you see Export Data button? yes? Go ahead click it:
– Select a. Post Level Date b. Select Start Time & End Time.
There’s lot of data, right!? Remember: If you think about it, You can extract other actionable insights too and build cool reports.
Any-who to our questions here is what we need:
a. Data in “Key Metrics” sheet
b. Column C: “Type”
c. Column N: “Lifetime Talking About This (Post)”
*People Talking about this include
– Liked, commented or shared your post
– answering a question
– responding to an event.
FYI: if you looking to see number of likes, shares & comments a post gets – check out “Lifetime Talking about this..” excel sheet. Step 4:
Create a COPY of this Excel File (For Backup purpose – Just in case we manage to mess up the data in this file)
AND then, Delete ROW 2 in Excel sheet: “key Metrics”. Just do it!
Step 5:
Now that we have identified the metrics i.e “TYPE” and “Lifetime Talking About This (Post)” – let’s select ONLY this data and create a new sheet. As you can see I have a new sheet titled “Only Important data goes here!”
You can Skip creating a NEW sheet – but make sure to select appropriate columns for PIVOT TABLE later.
Step 6
Make sure you are on our NEW sheet.
Go to Toolbar > Insert > PivotTable > Select Pivot Table
Step 7: No change, Just click on OK.
Step 8:
Now comes the part where we configure Pivot Table.
– Select All three fields from the “Choose Fields to add to report”
– Drag “Count of Post ID” and “Count of LifeTime talking about this” from Row Labels -> Values
Step 9:
We do not want the TOTAL number of “People Talking about it” – BUT we want On an Average – for a single post – How many people are “talking about this”.
So let’s change the function of “Life Time Talking about this” to AVERAGE.
Just (left) click on “Count of Lifetime Talking about this (Post)” > and select “Value Field Settings”
click on OK.
Step 10
Do you see this:
Now Look at your Pivot Table:
Can you see who won.
In the smack down of Status Updates vs Photo. Photos Won!*
*For my page: That may not be true for all pages! Just saying 🙂
And let me clean up the report a bit:
That’s about it!
Remember you can do MUCH MORE with the Data that you just DOWNLOADED! If you play with this data, please share what actionable insights you were able to extract out the data!
Have fun with Data!
Resource:
Facebook Page Insights Guide. From your Insights Dashboard:
Microsoft project codename “Social Analytics” is one nice beta project! Quoting from it’s site –
“it is aimed at developers who want to integrate social web information into business applications”
But the KEY here is that it allows you to integrate FILTERED social web information into your business applications. Today, you could go ahead – grab a twitter stream data – embed it in your application but guess what? In most cases, it’s too much information. Too much information means, that it’s very difficult for business-folks to take actions by analyzing these truckloads of information. And so:
even though we are data-rich – we are information (insight) poor.
My point being, that tons of information PRODUCED by [customers, partners, critics, employees..] GATHERED from [Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Blogs…] is NOT useful in it’s raw form. To take actions based on all these data-points – what we need is a way to categorize data (filter data) which would help the decision maker in seeing only SMALL part of data-set he/she needs for performing that particular analysis.
Let’s take an example:
A business-decision-maker wants to see “All twitter-users who have posted positive reviews about Windows 8 Design and User Experience”
How would you solve it?
Think.
Imagine.
Easy? hard?
Thinking of writing your own Sentiment Analyzer? awesome, & Good Luck!
Any-who, may be you know it’s not straight-forward to answer the above question using raw twitter data.
But here’s the thing you could use Third-party tools to solve the problem. Don’t get me wrong, I am not asking you to ignore them. But here’s how Microsoft Social Analytics helped me solve the above problem:
Here’s how I FILTERED the data: (It’s a thing called Social Analytic Engagement client)
And as you can see there are more than one ways you can slice/filter your data to provide a view that is best suited for a particular analysis assignment.
Please note:
1. Currently in beta: only two data-sets are available i.e. Bill Gates & Windows 8.
2. Apart from this nicely designed web based engagement tool, you can integrate the information into applications using Social Analytics API.
