Category Social Media

Twitter quietly launches access to account analytics

Twitter Analytics

I read this morning on Christopher Penn’s blog that Twitter had finally launched their own analytics platform — or, at least, made access to account analytics public, though you have to do some digging to get to them.

To access, click the gear icon from your Twitter timeline and select Twitter Ads. Once you’re logged into the Ads platform, you’ll see an Analytics drop-down menu in the top left corner. Click it, select Timeline Activity, and many curiosities will be met. Well, curiosities if you’re also a metrics / numbers nerd like myself. 🙂

The screenshot I included with this post is of my own analytics on @sarahwefald. Nothing too impressive there, though I am impressed with the reach multipliers Twitter tells me I’ve received. I spend most of my time on social media working on building the accounts and brands of my clients, so my relatively small numbers make sense to me.

If you want to get very granular with your Twitter data, this will not be the tool for you. You’ll still need Crowdbooster or equivalent if you want to find out the best times and days for you to post. Enterprise-level analytics companies shouldn’t be shaking in their boots just yet.

So, I guess it goes without saying that if you need me today, I’ll be pulling up the official analytics for all my clients’ accounts.

[Infographic] Optimize your Facebook posts

It can be tough to keep on top of “best practices” on Facebook. I say best practices in quotes as it seems like as soon as there’s a set of standards developed, everything changes and we go back to experimenting to find what works. The nice folks at Salesforce were kind enough to post this infographic online to help us create optimized posts on Facebook, or as they put it, “the perfect Facebook post.”

Basically, keep it short: 90 characters is the recommended limit. Target your post by location or language if it’s relevant, and if you’re going to start advertising your post, do it within the first 24 hours to reach more of your fans.

Source: Salesforce

infographic

Twitter launches new music service Twitter Music

Screen Shot 2013-04-21 at 6.46.03 PMAbout a week and a half ago, We Are Hunted announced they were joining Twitter.

This, of course, started a lot of chatter about Twitter’s plans in this space. We Are Hunted has been a much beloved music discovery app organizing and charting social media discussion about bands, and offering songs for download occasionally. Friday, the Twitter Music app went public.

Looking at the app this weekend, it seems that Twitter Music has borrowed from We Are Hunted’s design and, like its predecessor, surfaces what bands fans are talking about. Linking a Spotify or Rdio account allows for full-song streaming. What isn’t clear to me, however, is whether Twitter Music will start to offer downloads in partnership with bands and their labels as We Are Hunted did, or whether Twitter Music will have any curated tracklists. It’s also not clear to me whether the charts are determined by raw numbers of tweets in a given time period, or numbers of tweets by particular influencers, or some combination of the two.

Crowdsourcing has democratized a great deal of music marketing, but emerging artists still rely on curation and tastemakers to gain a toehold. I listen to new bands because my friends are talking about them, but my friends’ music tastes tend to be pretty varied. I have favorite music critics whom I watch for recommendations on what’s new and good. I didn’t start listening to Savages because of an algorithm; I saw Sasha Frere-Jones’ Instagram photos and posts to an email list describing how amazing their NYC show was, then looked them up.

I see a lot of potential in Twitter Music and will definitely be playing with it more in the coming days and weeks. However, I’m uneasy about the notion that something as warm and organic as finding out about new bands may be at least partially reduced to cold, detached data calculations.

UPDATE:

Thanks to Stephen Phillips, We Are Hunted founder turned Twitter engineer for Twitter Music, a little clarity on where the new app generates its charts:

How to reach your Facebook Page’s fans

Marketers have been saying for awhile now that the way to maximize your reach on Facebook when posting on behalf a Page to attach your message to a graphic of some kind. This became even more true after the move to Timeline. We started creating graphics for every announcement to ensure whatever news we were trying to communicate would reach its intended target by playing into Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm.

Then, Facebook changed their algorithm again a couple months ago. Suddenly, pages reaching 25%-30% if not more of their fans on Facebook found themselves reaching 10% of fans per post.

It appears they’ve changed it again.

Photo posts still seem to get the highest engagement numbers (clicks, shares, comments, likes). However, text-only status updates are getting greater reach numbers. In my experience this week, I posted two messages relevant to a page’s audience. The post on Tuesday was a graphic that included a link to a video in the caption. The post I made today was a status update about an item on sale at an upcoming event. Though the Tuesday post was perhaps more universally relevant to fans, the Wednesday post reached 75% more people.

If you need to broadcast information to your fans, embrace the status update! But if you want to engage them properly, keep doing it with photos.

Marketing yourself for a job search with Tim Tyrell-Smith at Social Media Campfire

Social Media Campfire is for and by Social Media Professionals who come together to discuss Social Media. This is a higher level discussion for people who work in or with Social Media. Think about sitting at a campfire where you have natural conversations, sharing stories and enjoy spending time with friends. That is what our Social Media Campfires are all about.

Lately, Marieke Hensel and Kathi Kruse have been focusing Campfire meetings around a different speaker each month for an open discussion about how the speaker uses social media in their industry. I’ve spoken with the group about the music industry, Kathy’s shared her incredible experience in the automotive world, and tonight Tim Tyrell-Smith dispensed great advice and knowledge on how to use social media to lay the groundwork for a job search and obtain new employment.

Here are just a few bullet points of some of our great, two-hour discussion:

  • Tim started building his brand online by blogging (both on his own site and guest blogging), and through speaking engagements.
  • His company is Fix, Build & Drive, a company helping business owners grow by better utilizing online marketing. He’s also developing Tim’s Strategy – software to help job seekers. He’s been working with college career centers to help manage their resources, and human resources departments to help soften the blow to employees in the event of layoffs.
  • He says that every time to have the opportunity to connect with someone online is an opportunity to communicate who you are and what makes you different from others who do the same thing. You may not see returns on this immediately, but it’s an important investment to make.
  • LinkedIn open networkers and open endorsers are not groups he likes. Basically, “open” people on LinkedIn will connect with or endorse anyone for any topic. I couldn’t help but think of the wild old days of Myspace when people thought it meant something that Tila Tequila had the highest number of friends on the platform. At this rate, LinkedIn isn’t far from becoming meaningless and having to do the amount of soul-searching and niching-down as Myspace is doing now.
  • That said, if you’re a job seeker, having a 100% complete profile on LinkedIn is key because it’s still an incredibly valuable way to get a warm introduction to someone at a company you’d like to work for, from whom you may not have heard back otherwise.
  • Job seekers can use Twitter to find work by following relevant recruiters (easily found by searching “recruiter”) and participating in Twitter chats like #ResuChat.

One of the things that resonated with me most was Tim’s belief that the most key point of networking, blogging, or public speaking is having the courage to be yourself. Having spent many years working with heavy metal bands, I felt like I had to split my Twitter use into two accounts geared towards music (from a fan’s perspective) and online marketing / web development, respectively. Though I’m not sure I’m being 100% authentic since I’m peeling off these layers of my personality and having them live separately from one another, it makes sense to deliver to those separate audiences the content they’re interested in. He also emphasized how important it is to know what you want and build from there. If you’re focused on one goal, it’s easier to take meaningful action.

Follow Tim on Twitter at @timsstrategy and @FixBuildnDrive.

Don’t lose the voting privileges you didn’t know you had!

Did you know you can vote on Facebook policy changes before they happen? 99.9% of Facebook doesn’t appear to.

The current policy up for the chopping block is the ability to vote against policy changes, and moving instead to allowing users to comment on what Facebook’s administration does.

If you want to be able to vote on this stuff in the future, click here to sign into the app, then vote to keep the current policy documents in place.

Cheat sheet: Social media graphics sizes

I’ve created custom designs for social media profiles and have made templates for myself here and there through trial and error, but this seems like a great shortcut. The less time you spend bumping graphic elements pixel-by-pixel around your Photoshop document, the more time you can put into pimping out your profiles!

The cheat sheet is courtesy Mediabistro’s AllTwitter blog.

36 rules of social media

Fast Company asked social media power users for their rules of engagement, and Mediabistro’s AllTwitter turned it into a handy infographic. Did they miss any of your rules?

While I agree with the overarching theme that it’s high time to stop treating social media as a broadcast platform and more like a conversation platform, I don’t think it’s impossible to have a monetization strategy that provides a good consumer experience at the same time.

Is Facebook’s EdgeRank prioritizing text-only posts?

Something I’ve noticed this week… Here’s two posts from a Facebook page this week, one text-only and one link. Text-only posts used to be hammered the hardest by Facebook’s EdgeRank (their algorithm that determines how many of your fans see a page’s posts).

Have you seen anything like this on your pages this week? Could this be an anomaly, or has Facebook changed EdgeRank radically again?

I have a Twitter account…now what?

I hear frequently from people in Meetup groups that they’ve started a Twitter account, but aren’t sure what to do with it or what to make of the platform. There are so many options that the path forward can seem paralyzing. Twitter is a two-way communication tool, so in that spirit, here are some tips to get you started on the right foot:

Welcome to Twitter! Post something

It takes some practice to compose a complete, legible thought in 140 characters or less. Practice it now, before you start focusing on getting your name out there. Are you posting thoughts from your day, or are you repurposing content from your website? Post links you find interesting or provocative. The goal is to allow someone encountering your Twitter page for the first time to be able to easily get the general idea of who you are and what you do.

Follow some interesting people

Twitter provides many lists of celebrities and other well-known people to new users. You can follow some of those if you like. However, chances are you have deeper interests than what Kim Kardashian wore yesterday. Whatever your major interests are, make sure you populate your feed with people you’ll want to talk to. I recommend following those that people you admire follow for now. (There are some more advanced means of finding good people to follow, which I’ll save for a future blog post.)

Talk to those interesting people on a regular basis

When you log into Twitter or open your Twitter app, you’ll see a ton of posts from all the people you’re following. Clicking the Reply arrow lets you send a reply back to that person. Replies starting with someone’s name (like @sarahwefald) don’t go out to all your followers; they’re only visible in the news feeds of anyone following both you and the person you’re writing. Keep in mind though that your comments are publicly readable, so take care!  I try to reach out to 3 people each day. Some ways to do this are to read someone’s blog post and reply back with thoughts about it, or answer a question someone asks. Make sure to reply to everyone who sends you an @reply message as well.

If you build it, they will come

Don’t worry about your Follower number for right now. Just concentrate on posting good content and having good conversations.