a survey or polling company to find out the information for you. Alternatively, you can do it yourself using an online survey creator platform, such as SurveyMonkey (www.surveymonkey.com), shown in Figure 3-1.
FIGURE 3-1: DIY online sites such as SurveyMonkey allow you to obtain important data points via polls and surveys.
Mining Your Social Media Accounts
Your existing social media data can provide in-depth insights on strategy and growth for your gamification marketing campaign. Social media data is the collected information from all your social network channels that show how your users share, view, and engage with your company.
In this section, I look at how to target the key data points in your social media data, and then look at a few individual social media platforms. Then I look into the difference between meaningful social media data versus useless vanity metrics.
Identifying key data points
The data from your social media channels will contain key data points for you to analyze. These key data points show the overall progress your company is making on social media. By analyzing these data points, you and your team will be able to make far more informed decisions on your future campaign’s content.
Follower growth: Although your company may have a growing number of followers, you will find that it’s more important to identify who these followers are.Is the growth a healthy rise or was there an unusual spike due to a viral post? If it’s the latter, you may find that most of the influx of followers may not identify with your company and, therefore, won’t engage with your campaign.Ultimately, you need to identify if this audience matches up with your gamification marketing campaign’s objectives.
Engagement: I find this one of the most effective of all the social media data points you can analyze. Engagement is usually measured by looking at the number of likes, comments, and shares your company’s social media posts generate.Analyzing your engagement metrics can help illustrate what type of posts creates more user interaction. For instance, you may find that picture posts engage more with your audience than text-based ones. You may also find that articles or blog posts that focus on your industry create more shares than ones that talk about your company. I’ve even noticed that an interesting article can generate more engagement than special-offer blog posts.Generally, a high engagement rate indicates your company is connecting well with your audience.
Social reach: Your social reach metric will show you how many people have seen your messages and how far your messages have traveled. Social reach is a good indicator of how well your social media accounts and content attract new audience members.By analyzing your social reach, you can work out if your company is, in fact, connecting and interacting with the right people.Your social reach metrics are usually easily accessible on the insights page on each of your social media channels.
Impressions: This can be an extremely complex metric to obtain. Impressions show how many times your company’s posts showed up on an audience’s news feed or timeline. In some instances, audiences may see your posts several times on their newsfeed due to some of their friends sharing it. So, one user can have multiple impressions.
Follower count: In my experience, this is the one metric that, when analyzed on its own, is the most useless. You’ll probably be looking at this metric to see how big your company’s social media audience is reaching. However, if all those followers are not constantly engaging, then this metric holds little to no value.
Likes and shares: Likes given to your social posts indicate a very key engagement metric. The more likes your social updates receive, the more engagement they’ll cultivate. This key data will show which of all your social content deserves more attention and has authority over the others.Shares demonstrate a more powerful metric than likes because they’re an indicator of loyalty. Audiences can like a post without even reading it. But a share means that the audience has genuinely engaged with your social content. This key data will measure the amount your customers want to recommend your company to their peers.
Mentions: I always liken mentions to what people say about you behind your back. I find that most times a company is given a “mention” on social platforms, the original commenter doesn’t even follow the company. You need to capture and acknowledge what people say about your company via mentions on all channels. Analyzing this key data can help to measure your social media growth.
Tracking unique metrics from each platform
To get a true measure of all metrics, you need a solid understanding of how well your company is performing on all the social media platforms. The good news is that most social networks offer their own native analytics, which makes mining metrics much easier. In this section, I look at some of the ways the popular social media channels offer this data.
Facebook Insights
If your company has created a Facebook Business page (and if you haven’t, get on that!), you can analyze some key data metrics within the social network’s channel, as shown in Figure 3-2:
Engagement: The number of likes, clicks, and shares your posts have generated. One useful feature allows you to compare metrics from one week with metrics from another week.
Post Reach: The number of people who have seen any of your content.
Impressions: The number of times your company’s page is displayed.
Organic Page Likes: The number of people who like your page without coming from an ad campaign. This metric highlights the total amount of likes, as well as the number of new page likes on a week-by-week basis. It also helps you understand if your Facebook presence is growing at a healthy rate.
Paid Likes: The number of people who have liked your page who came from your ad campaign.
Reactions: The number of people who have engaged with your posts by using the various Facebook reaction emojis.
Unlikes: The number of people who unliked your Facebook page this week. If this metric ever spikes, it’s worth investigating the reason, such as a controversial post.
FIGURE 3-2: Facebook Insights
