Cheapy social media analytics hacks
Bummer news from the twittersphere: "We've found effectively no correlation between social shares and people actually reading."
Thanks, Chartbeat, for that lead balloon.
If most people aren't reading, then how do we find the value in the medium as an organization?
We should watch what Influentials (defined below) do and say to separate signal from noise. Below are some tools and tips for doing this.
Influentials: Individuals who drive online conversations in important ways -- by introducing a new viewpoint, or by surfacing a new fact, facet, and idea. If a name keeps coming up across your searches, you've got yourself an Influential. The key thing to keep in mind is that these people may not have thousands of followers. Their klout score may suck.
Here are some tools for finding/following/analyzing Influentials:
Purpose: Monitor the general activity around the keywords.
Tool: http://www.trackur.com/
Purpose: Get top posts and impressions (one way to find Influentials).
Tool: http://tweetreach.com
Purpose: Download a user's followers (to start following the trail to Influentials).
Tool: https://scraperwiki.com
Purpose: Learn who follows whom.
Tool: http://doesfollow.com/
Tip: For things like #climate, there’s too much activity and most tools like Trakur will only give you about 2,000 posts, so you need to do double duty. Run the query on Tweet Archivist to get the twitter volume, and then a run a second query on Trackur excluding Twitter so you can get the activity from the rest of the social web.
Purpose: To measure/monitor Influentials engagement around a topic/issue.
Tool: http://www.tweetarchivist.com/
How: Say you want to count the number of mentions of “tax” for real-life tax policy expert Lauren French (a real-deal expert), put in a query “tax from:laurennfrench since:2013-06-26.” It might be zero, or it might be 100; you can then pull these mentions out and search for the mentions of the individual keywords, or you can use the charts on the left that shows when she's posted, (i.e 8 posts on 6/21, 9 posts on 6/22, etc.). Run a second query “from:laurennfrench since:2013-06-26” to get her total activity to compare it to the keyword activity.
