The Social Media Search Cycle: Social Media Reporting

Staring at a mass of qualitative data can be daunting, especially for marketing departments, P.R. firms, or small businesses that are new to social media reporting. Using the proper social media reporting and tracking tools you can turn this flow of data into useful, quantifiable, and persuasive information. Here's how to get started with social media reporting.

Categories, Organization, Social Media Reporting!

After adding your social media search terms, it can be enlightening and even fun to check out your search's feed. This is a great place to start thinking of how your business, product, service, or personal brand can be categorized. Looking at the results is helpful because you can see how the public defines or identifies your brand in their own terms, which may be contrary to your expectations.

If you were tracking social media for a local university, mentions would span a wide variety of categories: sports teams, blog posts about the history of the school, people attending events, staffers chatting about work, student complaints, graduation, student orientation, alumni, and even foursquare check-ins through Twitter.

This allows you to gain insights, via social media reporting, into who is conversing about your brand and why. When using these categories in conjunction with tags (i.e. "promotion," "complaint") you can easily see and chart where you should focus your promotional or crisis response efforts.

Don't forget the personal in social media

A common trick of P.R. firms and social media agencies is to pull out a couple of key Tweets, Facebook posts, or a YouTube videos that are insightful, funny, or support their findings. While you work through the social media mentions in your feed, it can be easy to get distracted by an interesting post. Social media is social after all. For these items you should create a tag called "quote" which you can pull up later when you begin to create your reports. Keeping the personal aspect in your social media reporting helps to remind everyone why tracking this information is helpful.

Social Media Reporting Made Easy

After you feel comfortable with your categories and and you have tagged recent mentions, you have done 90% of the work. The Looxii Graphs page automatically breaks each of your tag groups into its own graph, showing your data over time and in summary in an easy to read format. All that you need to do is set your time frame and export the graph images that are most useful to you.

If you are interested in a subset of data, i.e. just the "students" in the tag group "author type," you can use the filters near the top to view subsets of data. As you create your social media reports, don't forget the interesting mentions that you tagged "quote." You can pull these up by going to the Looxii Feed page and filter the feed by the "quote" tag.

Refine the Social Media Reporting Process

Ultimately, it's about looking at your data and determining what you want to get out of social media reports. Because of the social nature of the mentions and the differing web presence that each organization may have, determining the best categorical breakdowns for your reports and refining which categories you use over time is important. Thinking of social media tracking as a cycle can help to keep your reporting relevant to you and your organization.