Topic 11 – Analytics

Topic 11 (Analytics) deals with the quantitative aspects of this course. I explored different methods that we can use to see how our brand is perceived by the consumers. Because Facebook is the most important social media platform, I believe Facebook Insights is the instrument that every marketer should use.


Metrics are important in social media because they allow you to see how the campaign is performing almost in real time. For example, if it is not going anywhere, you don't have to through good money after bad and may need to rethink your strategy.

Topic 10 - Preventing and managing social media marketing mistakes

Topic 10 covered the prevention and management of social media marketing mistakes. It gave me the skills needed to implement systems that would allow a quick response to a brand attack, among other learning outcomes form this topic.
A brand attack is when social media users generate and spread bad publicity about your brand. To counter such an attack, it is necessary to (1) remove the bad comments from search engine results and (2) use social media to make the position of your company clear on the issue.

Topic 9 - Promoting social media marketing programs

When it comes to prompting your social media marketing program, the topic covered in this unit, no ideas can be too original or innovative. The more original it is the better.
However, I have learnt many standard ways to promote a social media campaign. One of such standard ways is to ask the visitors to your blog or social networking website page to let other people learn about this campaign. “Recommend to a friend ”feature is a must here. In addition, it is necessary to put some incentives in place to encourage people to use this feature. For example, you can offer group discounts, or discounts that would only become active when enough people express a wish to participate in the program. For instance, a clothing store wants to sell at least 100 discounted shirts every day. If not enough people will subscribe to this special, no shirts will be sold at all. This allows social media users to get in touch with their friends and ask them whether they would be interested in buying a shirt at a discount.

Topic 8 - Social CRM

Much of what I know about Customer Relationship Management (CRM) today comes from this topic. I plan to use the knowledge gained from it in the workplace. The main lesson I learned is that many of the customer’s questions are similar, so it is possible to create some sort of a database with ready-made answers, kind of “Frequently Asked Questions” – FAQs.
These FAQs will allow our call centre to focus on more complex questions that don’t have a canned response. For example, if a client asks, “How to unpack this product,” it makes sense to put that question in the FAQs section. However, if he inquires about, “Is it possible to use your product as a fertilizer,” the question will be much more difficult to foresee.
Another innovative idea that many firms use is to allow the social community to ask each other different questions, kind of “Yahoo! Answers” on a smaller scale. People who will answer questions will get points and thus improve their standing in the virtual community.

Topic 6 - Nurturing a Social community to build deeper relationships

Topic 6 covered how to nurture a social community to build deeper relationships. Even before I knew that what people think about your brand matters. Thanks to this topic, however, I now know that is social media it is even more important, as bad or good publicity spread very quickly as people interact with one another on a daily basis.
I also found out that there are many ways it is possible to make sense of what the social community is thinking about your brand. For example, the easies thing to do would be to perform simple searches on Faceook on Twitter of you company’s brand name or its product names. The results that will come on top of hte search results page will beindicative of the general mood of the public with regards to your brand or products. For example, if you see that most feedback about your brand is positive than things are going well. However, negative feedback should analysed more carefully as you need to determined what members of the social community are complaining about and what it the cause of their dissatisfaction.
Given the opportunity, I’d like to provide the research tools that can help us better understand our clients, as provided in the topic:
Research Tools - there are hundreds of research tools, these are a few examples -

Klout (http://klout.com/): This site uses analytics to track the popularity and influence of Twitte users.
WeFollow ( http://wefollow.com/): This site lists the most popular people in various categories – basically who the influencers are in news, music etc.
Twellow ( http://www.twellow.com/): Twellow is a search directory of public Twitter accounts with categories and search functions that help you find people who may be relevant to you.
TwitterSheep ( http://twittersheep.com/): This site makes a tag cloud out of the biographies of your
Twitter followers. It’s a great way to gain some quick insight into who is interested in your brand.
Profile Management and Reporting Tools
Hootsuite (http://www.hootsuite.com/): Hootsuite allows you to manage multiple Twitter and
Facebook accounts from one place, and offers tracking for the tweets you send out – how many people clicked on them and when they were most popular.
Cotweet (http://cotweet.com/): Targeted to businesses, Cotweet lets multiple people manage the same account and schedule posts, as well as aiding tracking.
TweetDeck (http://www.tweetdeck.com/): Tweetdeck lets you manage multiple Social Media accounts from one interface.
TwitterCounter (http://twittercounter.com/): Provides statistics on Twitter profiles and use.

Topic 5 - Key Platforms

Social media is a rather new invention. However, there are dozens of social media platforms, many of which use similar business models.
Topic 5 helped me better understand the characteristics that would allow me to compare different platforms. They include the number of active visitors, how many contacts an average use has, how many users use the platform on a daily basis, what languages are supported, how many countries the users come from, what activates they engage in and how many apps are available on a particular platform. Some of these characteristics apply only to social networks, others are try of all types of social media platforms.

Topic 3 - Social technographics

Topic 3 was my favourite topic in the course because it gave me the main ideas of how social media marketing works. The most valuable learning outcome for me in this topic was the classification of different types of social media users into 6 types. The first type are inactives or people who do not participate in social media at all. Then there are spectators who use social media as if they were just surfing the Net, in other words they just read the content created by others. Joiners, another type, join online communities such as Facebook. Collectors bookmark websites and collect information for their own interest or gain. Critics, still another type of users of social media are active participants of blogs and forums, while creators are the main asset of social media platforms, they create new content, setting up blogs and websites.