Month: March 2014

Who’s your most effective social influencer? awe.sm Insights does the math

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This is part 2 of an ongoing series exploring the experimental social media recommendation and optimization features being tested in awe.sm Insights. Collect them all!

Interested in participating in the experiment? Curious to see what optimizations we recommend for your social media marketing strategy? Reserve your spot to try it out.

We’re here to take a word back: Influencer.

Too many consultants and tools have promised to locate these mythical beings. Unfortunately, their methods ranged from specious to farcical. “Influential” became synonymous with “popular” or “chatty,” and the word stopped meaning anything at all.

We think it’s time to take “influencer” back by revisiting what the term is supposed to mean:

  • The point of social media marketing is to foster word of mouth.
  • Within social campaigns, the most valuable people aren’t the ones who shout the loudest…
  • …They’re the people who’ve built a relationship with you, engage on an ongoing basis, and repeatedly amplify.
  • When these individuals discuss a brand or recommend a product, their friends are more likely to take the advice.

If only there were a word for people who influence others.

Let’s measure influencers

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Help is here. Now, awe.sm identifies the influencers who are actually most important in driving business results. Below the fold on the current Insights screen you’ll find two lists: Top amplifiers and Most engaged.

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What are they?

These Insights sections identify individuals who are highly engaged with you or particularly effective at amplifying your content.

How does it work?

detail-amplifiers

In its default view, Top amplifiers ranks social media followers who, through a combination of their audience size and the frequency with which they retweet your posts, are your most influential amplifiers. To switch to seeing who has the most followers or who has retweeted you the most, click one of the respective column headers for a raw ranking.

The Most engaged section ranks followers’ engagement based on numerous factors. In the case of Twitter followers, we’re scoring a combination of their retweets, replies, favorited posts, and follower counts.

awe.sm allows raw sorting of influencers

For Facebook followers, it’s similar: shares, comments, likes, and friend counts. By clicking on any of the column headers, you can sort by an individual criterion.

What’s a VIP?

awe.sm Insights VIP mode

It’s okay to admit this: even with lists of who’s actually influential, it’s still fun to see who your most popular followers are, too. VIP view lists your followers who have the largest follower count themselves. Want to get them more engaged to convert them into influencers? Doesn’t hurt to drop them a line.

Why does it matter?

Suppose my celebrity godson has 100,000 Twitter followers, while I have only 10,000. Which one of us is a more valuable follower?

Now, add in the fact that our boy wonder has given you one perfunctory retweet, while I’ve retweeted you a dozen times, and routinely reply to your posts.

His retweet brought 100,000 impressions to a single one of your Tweets. Meanwhile, I’ve brought you 120,000 cumulative impressions, and our mutual followers have seen my frequent engagement with your content, building their trust. So who’s actually more effective?

Social media isn’t strictly a popularity contest, and influence isn’t determined just by reach. By showing you who’s actually an effective influencer, we’ll give you the power to cultivate relationships and start conversations that drive more visits, pageviews, and — ultimately —higher ROI.

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Trust but verify (for now)

Our tuning of the algorithms, and collection of additional signals, is ongoing. We warned you — this is an experiment, and it depends on your help.

  • If you’re awe.sm: Check out what Insights recommends for your social accounts, do a gut-check, and share your thoughts.
  • If you’re an awe.sm-to-be: The more the merrier. It’s not too late to join the experiment, see what Insights recommends, and learn how awe.sm helps maximize the ROI of your social media marketing. Contact us now to get started.

You’re well on your way to optimizing your social media marketing and maximizing ROI— and nobody can take that away.

Next: what content performs best on social media?

*Originally published on the awe.sm blog

Want to know when to post for maximum ROI? Now, awe.sm tells you.

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You likely remember that last week we introduced Insights, an experiment-in-progress to help marketers more easily understand what’s working and why. We’re still looking for help — get in touch to try it out, see what optimizations it recommends for maximizing your ROI, and share your feedback with us.

awe.sm uses sophisticated visualization techniques to indicate good and bad performance

This week we begin a deep dive into some of Insights’ current features and what they can do for you. First up: when to post.

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Little boxes, on the desktop

As features go, this one is pretty difficult to miss: a gigantic heat-map in the middle of your Insights screen.

What is it?

This Insights feature makes recommendations on when to make social posts, based on your previous posts’ performance.

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How does it work?

We’re able to make recommendations based specifically on whether you care most about trafficon-site conversion activity, or transaction values.

The default view, Clicks, shows the day and time when your posts are likely to receive the most clicks. The more colorful squares indicate periods whose posts received high click activity; the lighter colors indicate less.

  • This doesn’t show when clicks happened — it shows when you made the posts which got clicks.

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Use the pulldown to switch to Conversion counts to see when you ought to make posts which receive the greatest on-site activity. Depending on what custom conversion goals you’ve defined, this activity could be pageviews, downloads of your app, people submitting a form … whatever they are, in this mode, the heat-map will show darker colors for periods when you made posts which led to the greatest quantity of these taking place.

  • Bears repeating: remember, this doesn’t show when those conversions took place — it shows when you made posts which led to those conversions.

If your site includes conversions with dollar values attached — for example, shopping-cart transactions — then the third pulldown option, Conversion values, is probably the most exciting. See at a glance when to make posts which lead to the highest revenue. We think this is pretty much the holy grail of social media optimization.

Why does it matter?

If you’ve given this a whirl, you’ve almost certainly noticed something peculiar: the best time to post to maximize clicks isn’t the best time to post to maximize conversions.

This may seem illogical at first, but it makes sense when you consider the various personas of visitors to your site. During the workday, a follower may be willing to click more links in her social streams, and browse more page content — sure beats writing those TPS reports… — but Sunday night may be when she has the wallet out and she’s ready to buy.

Knowing exactly when your posts lead to each desired outcome is necessary if you want to understand how your marketing works and how to improve it. Savvy marketers have used this level of scrutiny to optimize their web marketing for years; now awe.sm is helping to optimize social media marketing too.

Keep in touch

Remember, we warned you: all of this is an experiment, so we’ll be continuing to tweak our algorithms to improve accuracy based on what insights are most useful to you. At the same time, the more you post, the more data we crunch; and the more feedback you provide, the more we’ll learn. So:

  • Current awe.sm customers: Keep plugging and chugging and use the feedback button with frequency and fervor.
  • Future awe.sms: We need your help too. Get in touch and we’ll add you to the experiment posthaste.

Stay tuned

Next week, we learn how to identify and engage top amplifiers. Are you excited? We’re excited.

*Originally published on the awe.sm blog

Be an awe.sm hero: help us create Insights

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Starting today, you can have a hand in helping us perfect a new experimental awe.sm feature:Insights. The project aims to identify for marketers what content is working, when to post, and whom to engage. But we need your help.

Interested? Read on…

Help us create awe.sm Insights

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Starting today, awe.sm customers have access to an experimental preview of a new awe.sm section.

Insights is a new top-down view of all of your social media marketing organized around what’s working and what matters.

In its first draft, Insights can tell you, at a glance…

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  • When to post — based on what posts have drawn traffic, engagement, and conversions.
  • Whom to engage. Your most popular follower isn’t necessarily your most effective amplifier (and, in most cases, is not), so we consider whose amplification and engagement maximize your impressions, traffic, and results.
  • What content works — not just at being amplified, but more importantly at generating ROI.
  • What content doesn’t. Maybe you want to give it a lift; maybe you want to take it behind the barn. That’s up to you, but we thought you should know. (Sorry.)
  • What’s hot right now. Is a piece of content newly attracting more clicks and conversions? Is engagement spiking for a social post? Did you just get a burst of new followers? Let’s find out why.

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Try it out

Insights is available to awe.sm customers now, if you manually point your browser to be.awe.sm/insights. Give it a whirl.

Not yet awe.sm? That’s easy enough to fix. For a walk-through of our tools and a deep-dive into how we can help optimize your social media marketing to maximize your ROI, hit us up for a demo.

Break all the things

This is a work in progress. Between when I took screenshots and now, we’ve already moved things around. It will continue to change; things will disappear; new things will take their place; and stuff will break. We actually expect it to break — we want it to break — so we can understand exactly how our customers will interact with it at scale.

The obvious disclaimer here is that this means you almost certainly absolutely shouldn’t blindly trust what Insights tells you (yet). But the way that we’ll fine-tune our rankings, make our reports easier to understand and act upon, and help marketers maximize the ROI of their social media marketing is by throwing our baby (Insights) out to the lions (you) in the Colosseum (I lost control of this metaphor), and making constant improvements as we go.

Tell us all about it

Tilly McLain is just a click away. Click away. Click away, yeah

Here’s where we need your help.

The whole enterprise depends upon your candid feedback, so don’t be shy. Make liberal use of the “Help” and “Ideas” tabs that float in the bottom right corner of Insights (and throughout awe.sm) to tell us what you love, what you hate, and what else we should try.

Why?

The first question people tend to ask us somehow involves our canine staff member, but the secon— well, the second question people tend to ask is whether the company is really called “awe.sm”, and whether that’s pronounced “awesome”. (Yes.) Okay.

But the third question tends to be a variation on this theme:

Thanks for the data, but now what?

awe.sm’s all about helping marketers understand the ROI of their social media marketing by tracking the success of each social post. And at this we’re only getting better and better and better. But for all the powerful ways we help marketers slice and dice their data, we continue to hear feedback that you’d like us to wrap it up into actionable conclusions, too.

You can do it (put your back into it)

At the end of the day, the point of awe.sm tracking is to identify what works, so you can do more of that, and identify what doesn’t, so you can do less — saving yourself time and money. So our holy grail remains a product that straight up says, Do this, not that and makes it easy for you to do it.

We continue to experiment with ways to deliver that insight. As is their wont, some of those experiments work better than others, and we’ve probably come away with enough learnings on data visualization and event detection to write multiple poorly-selling books.

Want to help us bring something amazing to life? Want to help us at least come up with more stuff for the inevitable books? Good. Buckle up.

Unleash your inner mad scientist. Check out an awe.sm demo and join the experiment here.

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*Originally published on the awe.sm blog

Video: meet awe.sm’s new dashboard

If you missed this week’s news about awe.sm’s new dashboard for marketers, here’s a video recap.

We’re pretty excited by how much easier it gets, every day, to use awe.sm to understand the ROI of brands’ social media marketing investments. Take a look:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXn1MnEQCfs]

Learn more about the dashboard here, then schedule a demo.

*Content originally published on the awe.sm blog

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