This document discusses monitoring and analyzing social media effectiveness. It begins with introductions and an overview of goals for the session, which include setting goals for social impact, measuring impact through metrics like traffic and engagement, and assessing data to improve strategies. The document then provides examples of setting goals for social impact campaigns and questions to consider when setting goals. It also outlines various tools for measuring traffic, engagement, and analyzing social media accounts and performance.

1. Monitoring & Analyzing Social Media
Effectiveness
Lou Woodley @LouWoodley
Laura Wheeler @laurawheelers
#scioimpact

2. Intros Who are we?
•The nature.com Communities team
•Support NPG’s social media activities (Twitter, Facebook, G+, Pinterest etc)
•Support and promote NPG’s staff blogs – blogs.nature.com
•Update the nature.com Communities blogs – Of Schemes and Memes,
Soapbox Science
•Event organisation – SpotOn (Science Policy Outreach and Tools Online) –
annual 2 day conference in London (#solo12) and monthly events in NYC (#sonyc)
•Content and discussions around the events on the new SpotOn website.

3. Intros Who are you?
•Tell us a bit about yourself…
•Where are you from? What do you do? Are you representing yourself, an
organisation or both?
•Is there anything in particular that you’d like to get out of today? Specific
questions, goals or problems that you’d like to brainstorm?
Nice to meet you!

4. Intros What are we going to do today?
Intros
Setting goals - what impact would you like to have?
Measuring your impact:
Traffic
Engagement
Assessing impact – how to respond to the data to improve your
strategies
We aim is to have lots of discussion, and some hands-on experimenting
with the tools.

5. Impact What are your goals?
What are your goals when using social media?
You can’t assess your impact if you don’t know what you are trying to achieve!
Chose the right metric/tool to monitor each goal. You may need multiple
metrics/tools.
You can’t always measure goals with raw numbers – perhaps you need to create
your own reporting systems in addition to the various tools available.
Gather baseline metrics which you can compare your performance against:
What happened last time you did something similar?
What results do other people doing similar things achieve?
Do you need to do an initial trial?
Do your goals as an individual differ from those when representing an
organisation?

6. Impact Some possible goals
Increase traffic to your blog (Why?)
Discussion and dissemination of scientific papers/science news (By
whom?)
Increase subscriptions to your site or sales of your product
Raise awareness of an event, a new product, a petition, a fund-raising
campaign
To reach specific groups (women in science, post-docs, teenagers)
As a feedback channel (customer service, trouble-shooting, ideas
gathering)
To create loyalty via interactions with key users, subject experts
Recruitment
These would each be more specific e.g. double traffic in 6 months

7. Impact Some possible goals
To be sociable and part of a community! Find interesting content,
contacts and conversation
Community = people + shared interests
Source of motivation and support e.g. #PhDchat, #madwriting
To raise your online profile – be seen as a subject area expert,
networking
Job seeking
What are your goals?

8. Impact Questions to ask when setting
goals
Are your goals the same for all social media channels?
Does this affect what content you post on different channels?
Do you have multiple goals at any one time? How does this affect your
strategy and how you monitor your results? Is the same person/team
responsible for the activity on all channels?
Has anything changed recently with any of the social media platforms
that may need some background research/extra training? Will this
change any of your baseline metrics?
Do your goals change? Are some very short-term e.g. to sell all the
tickets for a one-off event? Are others long-term? e.g. to provide ongoing
customer service with all queries answered within an hour.

9. Impact Questions to ask when setting
goals
Do you have all the support you need to make achieving your goals
worthwhile e.g. if you’re seeking feedback, do you have somewhere to
share it or someone within your organisation who is going to take it
seriously?
Will you need to record and report any of your metrics? Do you have
template documents to populate with the data?
Will you need to carry out any training or establish any best practice
guidelines?
Are there friends and other contacts that you could reach out to who
might be willing to amplify your activities?

10. Impact Setting Goals
GOAL: Encourage online participation in a real-life event in NYC from attendees
elsewhere in the US and the UK.
POSSIBLE METRICS:
Number of tweets on the event hashtag
Number of unique users tweeting on the hashtag
Number of influential users tweeting on the hashtag
Increase in number of followers of the account associated with the event
Traffic to blog posts on the event website
Number of blog posts written about the event on other sites (and which ones)
How many days before/after the event does the hashtag continue to be used?
e.g. #sonyc, #reachingoutsci, #PhDelta
If similar events are to be hosted, this data can be used to create a baseline
against which future events can be compared.

11. Impact Setting Goals
Each social site has different social impact indictors.
e.g.
Twitter: followers, mentions, RTs, favourites
Facebook: likes / comments / shares
Blog: subscribers, views, visits, comments
YouTube: views, comments
Pinterest: repins, likes, followers
Alone, these figures can be relatively meaningless. For instance, you may have a
high follower count but not much engagement. Need to dig deeper to interpret
them more fully.
Let’s have a look at some tools that might be helpful…

12. Tools Traffic
•What you can learn from traffic analytics?
•Where in the world your readers are coming from
•How long they stay on your site for and whether they look at other
pages there
•Which topics are most popular
•Which times to post are most popular (and how long interest in a post
lasts)
•Whether to repost content again at a later date (#windbackweds)
•Which referral sites/platforms are working for you
•Traffic data are OPEN metrics – no weird algorithms to massage the raw
data
•We’ll mention:
•Google Analytics
•Chartbeat
•plumanalytics.com/
•Bitly

13. Tools Traffic – Google Analytics
•Google Analytics can track the impact of social media traffic on your
site, going beyond clicks, retweets and other vanity metrics.
•Also have the option at looking at traffic in real time.
#1: Identify Where Your Social Traffic Comes From (Could help with
organising events, Facebook location targeted ads)
#2: Determine What Social Media Traffic Comes From Mobile Devices
(Means you may want to check how your content shows up on mobile
devices)
#3: Who are your social referrals?
•How does this data inform your actions? Change your Facebook
tactics to try to get more traffic? Spend more time on Twitter because this
is what’s giving you the best results?

14. Tools Traffic – Google Analytics

15. Tools Traffic – Google Analytics
 Google Analytics offer Campaign Codes, allowing you to track specific
social activities.
 For example you can add a campaign code to the end of any URL you wish
to track, e.g.
utm_campaign=ScienceOnline2013
 Then go to Traffic->Campaigns and you'll see "ScienceOnline2013" and
you'll see metrics for that specific post (pages/visit, avg. time on site, plus
more).
 This helps you to measure the performance of individual posts, from specific
social sites.
 For more info on Google Analytics and how to get the best out of your
campaigns, check out these posts:
http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/measure-social-media-traffic-using-google-analy
http://www.eugenoprea.com/advanced-segments-in-google-analytics/

16. Tools Traffic - Chartbeat

17. Tools Traffic - bitly

18. Tools Traffic – Plum Analytics
Plum Analytics tracks the following metrics:
Usage - Downloads, views
Captures - Favourites, bookmarks, saves, readers, groups, watchers
Mentions - blog posts, news stories, Wikipedia articles, comments,
reviews
Social media - Tweets, +1's, likes, shares, ratings
Citations - PubMed, Scopus, patents
•This requires a subscription

19. Tools Engagement
What is “engagement”?
Define what this means for you – maybe you could create a scale that
represents increasing effort made by your community or increasing value
to you achieving your goals?
Number of likes on a FB post
Number of comments on a FB post or blog post?
Number of tweets on a hashtag
Number of people who subscribe to an RSS feed
Number of people prepared to watch the livestream of an event and live
tweet it
Number of people willing to provide content for your site (paid or free)
Number of people willing to organise or moderate a panel at an event
Number of people prepared to purchase a product

20. Tools Engagement - Topsy
•Topsy is a useful tool for
observing social discussions.
•Can be used to scan Twitter,
Google+.
•Attempts to rank results by
influence, effectively filtering
spam.

21. Tools Engagement – social mention
• Social Mention is a free tool
that scans over 100 social
media outlets and returns a list
about where you are
mentioned.
•It then tries to associate
sentiment to these posts – are
people saying nice things, bad
things, or neutral things?
•While the site can be
inconsistent and has other
issues, for example it is not so
great for Twitter, it gives a
good indication what people
are saying.

22. Tools Engagement – Facebook Insights
•Facebook Insights
are free, but you
must have at least
30 likes on your
page to qualify for
them.

23. Tools Engagement – Agorapulse
•Agorapulse helps you
analyse your Facebook
activities, providing
statistics. This is not a free
service and requires a
subscription.
•Agorapulse can also help
you to analyse your
competitors’ activities and
tell you the best times to
post to Facebook.

24. Analysing Assessing accounts
 You’ve run a social media campaign or dabbled with a few social
media platforms – now what?
 Take the data you’ve collected and decide whether you need to
tweak your activities…

25. Analysing Klout
•Klout currently tracks a
user’s Twitter, Facebook,
Linkedin, Foursquare,
Google+.
•The Klout Score is the
measurement of your
overall online influence.
The scores range from 1-
100 with higher scores
representing a wider and
stronger sphere of
influence.

26. Analysing Klout
 Some thoughts on Google+ influence from the Klout blog:
http://corp.klout.com/blog/2011/11/do-you-have-google-klout/
 Comparing Social Actions on Google+, Twitter, and Facebook
 Key similarities:
 A comment, like or +1 on either Facebook or Google+ is a sign of engagement between
the user who posted the content and the user who commented / liked / +1ed it.
 A +1 on Google+ is similar to a like on Facebook, in the sense that both are validation
mechanisms for “approval” of content.
 A Reshare on Facebook or Google+ or a Retweet on Twitter both propagate the original
content to a wider audience.
 Important differences:
 A comment or a Like on Facebook may cause your content to appear in the news feed
of mutual friends. On Google+ a comment or +1 surfaces your content not just to mutual
friends but to anyone who has added you to their circles.
 +1s on Google+ may also cause your content to appear in Google search results.
 Due to the larger size of the network, a Retweet on Twitter may propagate your content
to a wider audience than a Reshare on Google+ or Facebook. On the other hand, a
Reshare on Google+ or Facebook may help you engage with an active audience, even if
the size of the audience is smaller.

27. Analysing PeerIndex
How PeerIndex describes
what it measures:
Topic fingerprint: a snapshot
of what you talk about.
Topic resonance: how much
other people find what you
share valuable.
Comparisons: compare
yourself to your friends and
peers.
TOP TIP: There’s a Chrome
plugin that lets you see a
user’s PeerIndex score in
your Twitter stream

28. Analysing PeerIndex
•Peerindex also has a (now) separate service that allows you to create
groups of up to 100 people.
•You can use these to view the scores of people you’re interested in and
track some of their tweets
•Browsing other public groups can help you to identify online influencers
that you might want to interact with or watch for tips 
•http://groups.peerindex.com/

29. Analysing Kred Story
•Kred enables users to
obtain a visual “tiled”
dashboard of your most
influential social posts.
•These posts may
contain links, videos,
pictures or other social
content.
•You can then analyse
these important
moments for trends.

30. Analysing Pinterest tools
There are also similar impact
measurements for Pinterest: Pinpuff and
PinReach.

31. Analysing Impact Scores
Summary
It can be appealing to have a single number to measure your impact, but such
scores should be used carefully! Many are “closed” metrics – they use unknown
algorithms to generate a number.
Do not use as the only indication of social impact.
Remember to gather baseline statistics for comparisons and use common sense
to check if the scores match your experiences.

32. Analysing Activity
The SocialBro desktop app is useful for analysing your Twitter use.
This is not a free service but some of it’s functions are really useful.
 Create Tag clouds from your community
 Find the best time to tweet
 Find and manage followers
 Manage Twitter lists
 Demographics

33. Analysing Times to engage
•Crowdbooster provides
real-time Facebook and
Twitter analytics.
•It also offers
recommendations, for
example when is the best
time to engage online.
•You can manage
multiple accounts,
schedule posts, shorten
links via bit.ly and set
analytic alerts.
•This is not a free service.

34. Analysing TwentyFeet
•Twentyfeet is a synergy
between SocialBro and crowd
booster.
•Does a few things crowd
booster doesn’t do.
•Using just one dashboard isn't
the best practice to use a
couple can mean you get more
information.

35. Analysing Aggregating and curating
•Social media can have a short half-life. Platforms don’t
always make past updates easy to find or conversations easy
to follow.
•If you’d like to archive key conversations e.g. around specific
events or a particular topic of interest, you can use tools such
as Storify.
•You can then alert everyone you have included in the Storify
to help you to spread the word and possibly continue the
conversation.
•Other tools to explore: RebelMouse, Branch.

36. Analysing Referral traffic
If you’re looking for really big boosts in traffic, several news aggregator
sites might be worth exploring.
Reddit has become increasingly popular - but take note of its spam
policy.
Does bounce rate matter to your goals? What’s a meaningful page view?
Other sites that may be worth investigating:
Digg
StumbleUpon
Slashdot
Hacker News

37. Analysing Managing multiple accounts
•Do you need to have a presence on multiple social media sites, does it help with
impact?
•Use larger accounts to help spread the word about new accounts or accounts for
one-off events
•Managing multiple sites tools:

38. Dark Social You can’t monitor everything!
•Dark social includes traffic sent to your website/blog from social sharing such as
email recommendations or links posted into IM conversations.
•Doesn’t show up as social traffic
•Image source: The Atlantic
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/10/dark-social-we-have-the-
whole-history-of-the-web-wrong/263523/

39. To continue Links
 Useful set of entry level videos on social media use:
http://vimeo.com/57241964
 30 social media monitoring tools, plus more suggestions in the comments:
http://www.tripwiremagazine.com/2011/07/social-media-monitoring-
tools.html
 Wiki of useful links to social media articles established by Christie Wilcox
http://socialnetworkingforscientists.wikispaces.com
 Matt Shipman’s post on thinking about “unconventional” metrics
http://www.scilogs.com/communication_breakdown/unconventional-metrics/
 More tips on measuring impact http://www.wdfm.com/marketing-tips/jim-
sterne-social-media.php
 Alphabetical list of some social media tools to check out
http://www.andymiah.net/2012/12/30/the-a-to-z-of-social-media-for-
academics/

40. Thank you!
 If you’d like to contribute any other useful links to the
google doc, please do!
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jSnjhNFOf8Bem7Ixa
HUthS7i_BtoDkELlrWYh5PtIAc/edit