Tag Archive for: social data

Where to Find Your Social Data

June 30, 2014/by Corey Padveen

Social data is everywhere, and these are a few of the places where you can find it.

We constantly hear people talking about big and social data, and the concept of using these social data in order to build strategies, identify opportunities and construct campaigns is quite exciting. The issue we face, however, is that it is not entirely clear where we can find these social data in order to begin harnessing their value.

These sources are just a few of the places where social data exists and where it can be extrapolated and used in order to achieve any one of the above-mentioned goals.

Owned Social Media

This is a given. Your owned social media – any account that is owned and operated by your brand on networks like Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, to name a few – possess mountains of data that can be mined and analyzed for your own needs.

Raw data might not look very exciting (see the Excel spreadsheet below) but for anyone who knows how to use it, it certainly is.

Screen Taken 6-27-14

You can export reports and analyze data sets directly from networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and now Google+ with their latest My Business feature. This data can then be manipulated in a number of ways to serve your own purposes.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is the example, but virtually any platform used to monitor web traffic provides us with an exorbitant amount of data – and not just web data, either. (Google Analytics was chosen because of the websites that monitor their traffic, roughly 95% use Google Analytics.)

Screenshot Taken 1-28-2014

While most people use Google Analytics simply to monitor web traffic, the social menu (shown above as a subsection beneath the Acquisition tab) provides some detailed reports on the activities taken by your social audience. Learn their tastes and interests using Universal Analytics, study their behavior on your website looking at things like the Users Flow chart and begin to craft strategies that you know will appeal to these interests and habits.

This process can be further optimized by using Goals and Filters in Google Analytics to begin filtering out traffic and focusing only on a social network, for example, then setting goals to measure the effectiveness of campaigns or strategies on different networks.

Screenshot Taken 1-28-2014

Social Media Monitoring and Listening Technologies

There are no shortage of technologies that exist on the market that make it easy for brands to collect and analyze copious amounts of social data – from industry data right down to competitor insights.

Tools range anywhere from free or inexpensive platforms that provide some fairly useful insights – like Mention, for example – to high-end enterprise level tools that run in-depth analyses on the data collected and provide you with some extremely useful reports – tools such as Crimson Hexagon.

Image Credit: Crimson Hexagon

Social Ad Reports

Social advertising is still in a state of infancy, and therefore, a state of complete affordability. A small injection of cash can lead to major – and very measurable – results. Those results are full of valuable data (because these results go into greater detail about the activities taken by your audience).

When or after running a social ad campaign, collect all of your data, download all of your reports and really start to analyze the results to see where opportunities exist, what you might be able to learn about your target demographics, and how you can turn this small investment into some hugely beneficial strategies that generate equally impressive (if not more impressive) organic results.

Conclusion

While there is data everywhere, these are just a few of the places where brands can begin sourcing and mining their own data. These insights can then be moulded into whatever you need them to be. The beauty of raw data is that they are simply numbers until something is done with them. So they are completely in your control. And as we all know, control is nice to have when trying to build a brand on social media.

Where do you look for social data? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!

t2 Marketing International and NexLevel Sales Partner to Offer Unique Services

May 29, 2014/by Corey Padveen

Industry leading digital marketing consultancy joins forces with Forbes Top 30 Social Sales Influencer

Two internationally recognized thought leaders and industry experts combine skills to provide a unique consulting, coaching and training program in digital marketing and social selling strategies.

See the official press release here.

t2 Marketing International’s Director of Global Social Business Strategy, Corey Padveen, and NexLevel Sales Founder, Julio Viskovich, named by Forbes as one of the Top 30 Social Selling Influencers in the World, will combine their expertise by providing consulting, training and coaching to corporate clients in North America and Europe in the areas of Advanced Digital and Social Media Marketing Strategy, Social and Big Data Analysis and Social Selling.

The joint program provides businesses with a complete suite of digital marketing and sales strategies ranging from data mining and analysis techniques to social selling strategies, social care best practices, content strategies and full-scale social media program development, coaching and training.

The group provides a number of distinctive benefits and solutions including:

Social selling training headed by one of the world’s premier social selling experts, ranked in Forbes as one of the Top 30 Social Selling Influencers in the World
Data analysis and activation strategies and coaching with members of a globally-recognized team of experts, specializing in correlation-based campaign development and predictive digital analytics
Engagement programs intended to connect with and convert users identified on social media throughout various stages of the sales pipeline by leveraging listening and monitoring platforms and campaigns
ResponsiveBranding^TM strategies that leverage a brand’s social insights in order to optimize campaign targeting and social ad spends
Social media integration into the business as a whole, and steps to begin the process of transitioning a traditional brand’s corporate culture into that of a social enterprise
Sellarketing strategies whereby the barriers separating sales and marketing teams are eliminated in an effort to link the sales process directly to the marketing efforts of a brand or product

About the Consultants

Corey Padveen, t2 Marketing International

Corey Padveen is the Director of Global Social Business Strategy at t2 Marketing International. Corey is Google AdWords and Analytics Certified, a Certified Inbound Marketer and a principle theorist on the notions of Social Equity and ResponsiveBranding^TM. He is also a regular contributor to leading industry publications, such as Search Engine Journal and Social Media Today, and a keynote speaker at digital marketing and social media conferences around the world. t2 Marketing International has a rich 25 year history in integrated marketing solutions working with leading brands in the United States, Canada, Europe, Latin America and Asia.

Julio Viskovich, NexLevel Sales

Julio Viskovich is a highly sought after social selling consultant, trainer and implementation specialist. Julio was named by Forbes as one of the Top 30 Social Selling Influencers in the World and is the author of Sellarketing – a tweetable book to help sales and marketing leaders embrace and adopt social media as part of their process. After being the internal social media trainer and the face of social selling to HootSuite’s 9 million plus users, he founded NexLevel Sales to help organizations adopt social media through carefully planned strategy and policy along with support from marketing. Julio has worked with a number of Fortune 500 brands to develop, implement, and build local social selling programs, and social communications strategies, and adopt social media strategically throughout the entire organization.

For further information or to schedule a consult, contact:

Corey Padveen
T: (1) 800-607-4550 ext. 4
Email: corey [at] t2marketinginternational.com

Julio Viskovich
T: (1) 604-209-3001
Email: julio [at] nexlevelsales.com

4 Reasons Why B2Bs Should Leverage Social Data

January 31, 2014/by Corey Padveen

Though it is no secret that social data is important, B2B brands are not taking enough advantage of it.

Data mining – whether on a large or small scale – is a critical component when it comes to a successful social business strategy; this is especially true when it comes to B2Bs. And yet, so few B2B brands are taking advantage of the values that social data can offer when building a comprehensive, goal-oriented strategy.

The reasons listed below should be enough to convince any decision maker as a B2B enterprise to start paying closer attention to their social data.

Optimize Your Content Strategy

Recently, we published an article discussing the difference between content strategy and content marketing. Essentially, your content strategy is the strategy with which you are going to generate interest from your target audience on social platforms.

As a B2B, it can sometimes seem difficult to find a message that resonates with your audience. After all, with so much content from which people can choose, the message from a B2B is not always going to make it to the top of the pile. By keeping a close eye on your data, however, you can see exactly what types of content and what motifs generate the most interest from your audience, and share information geared towards garnering their attention.

Monitor Your Competition

It’s one thing to look at superficial measurements, like the growth of a competitor’s network. It is another thing entirely to dive into the public data that exists about your competition’s social presence and see where they are succeeding, where opportunities exist for your brand and, most importantly, how you compare in terms of share of voice and sentiment when it comes to key criteria.

Because we might not necessarily be looking at increasing sales directly through social media as B2Bs, it is important to find a way to set benchmarks for measuring success. Often, identifying KPIs among your competition’s data and striving to surpass those benchmarks is a great way to work.

Reach Broader Audiences

Understanding when your target audience is most active and where they spend the majority of their time is going to be essential to reaching the broadest audience possible.

At the outset of any social business program, you are going to want to ask yourself who you want to reach. Do you want to reach your buyers, or would you rather reach the end users of products or services to whom you are selling? Knowing what kind of audience you want to reach with your content will help you better leverage this data in order to ensure that every piece of content you share is shared strategically so as to reach the broadest audience possible.

Understand Your Buyers

On the surface, social is all about sharing stories. But just beneath there is a world of opportunity in the form of data, and that data can be leveraged not only on these social media, but in your business operations.

Studying the data that concerns your buyers – either as individuals or businesses – on social media can help you optimize your offline and off-social marketing initiatives in order to ensure that they resonate with your buyers.

Traditional B2B marketing tactics need to incorporate, at least to a degree, social data. By understanding your buyers’ habits, preferences and knowing what it is they are looking for, you can better prepare yourself offline to make the sale.

The potential that exists within your social data is virtually limitless. With so much being published every day, and more insights being made available at every second, it is hard to understand why more B2B businesses are not taking the time to study social data.

Are you leveraging your social data? What are you using it for? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!

And next week, don’t miss our Director of Global Social Business Strategy, Corey Padveen speaking live in Las Vegas! Find out more here.

If You Ignore Your Social Data, You Ignore Your Business

November 15, 2013/by Corey Padveen

If you are not paying attention to your social data, then you are ignoring one of the most valuable assets you have in your social business.

With every action taken on social channels, social data is being gathered and analyzed behind the scenes. First, let’s dispel one rumour very quickly: activity on social media is measurable. You just need to know what to measure and where to find your social data.

Paying attention to these insights is going to be an integral part of running a successful social business. How will you know if your strategy is generating results and helping your business grow if you are not monitoring your initiatives’ performance?

Below are three types of social data you should keep a close eye on when it comes to your social business’s performance (and a few places to monitor that data).

Demographics Engaged

There are billions of people active on social networks every day. It is nice to think that every one is a potential customer, and a good way to overcome the fear of getting started, but the reality is that your real potential customers are making themselves shown every day – you just need to know where to look for them.

Look at your Facebook Insights to see what groups of people are consistently engaging with your content. The new Facebook Insights provide some great ways to do this. If you are running Twitter ads, pay close attention to those most actively clicking on your promoted tweets. On LinkedIn, look at your company page stats to see what groups of people find your company most interesting.

These are just a few of the easy ways you can monitor your most engaged demographics and understand how you can better align your business to target these markets.

Ad ROI

Social advertising is not being given enough credit (yet) as a legitimate source of advertising. Trust us, it is. But still, entrepreneurs running their own operations are often throwing a few dollars behind a Facebook as hoping that is generates some clicks and brand awareness. Not enough!

Set goals, target specific demographics and, both when it is over and while it is running, pay attention to your results! When looking at this social data, you might find that a user-base you hadn’t anticipated being so attracted to your offer is up there with the most active. Knowing your market’s wants and tailoring your services to provide for those wants is what keeps you ahead of the competition.

And it’s easy to find! In your Twitter Ads Manager, Facebook Ads Manager, LinkedIn Ads Manager and others, you can see all of this data in real-time!

Content Strategy

Once again, simply sharing content is not going to drive the results you hope to get as fast as you hope to get them. Every once in a while, we have a brilliant idea that helps our content go viral. And I don’t know about you, but those blue moons have been coming around less and less since the whole world has started trying to create their own viral video. Focus on how your content is being engaged with, and optimize your strategy accordingly.

Again, Facebook Insights provides you with some great insight into what types of content are generating interest. You can also look at your LinkedIn Page Insights, among other sources. This information is out there ready to help you succeed on social. Use it to your advantage!

Find out how t2 can help you leverage your social data here.

How are you leveraging the power of social data? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!

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