Social Media Analytics Strategy

Using Data to Optimize

Business Performance

―

Alex Gonçalves

Social

Media

Analytics

Strategy

SOCIAL MEDIA ANALYTICS

STRATEGY

USING DATA TO OPTIMIZE BUSINESS

PERFORMANCE

Alex Gonçalves

Social Media Analytics Strategy: Using Data to Optimize Business Performance

Alex Gonçalves

Las Vegas, Nevada, USA

ISBN-13 (pbk): 978-1-4842-3101-2 ISBN-13 (electronic): 978-1-4842-3102-9

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-3102-9

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017959562

Copyright © 2017 by Alex Gonçalves

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To my grandfather, Maximiano Gonçalves, who

proved through his many books, that writing and

sharing knowledge is amazing and possible.

To my father, Maximiano Gonçalves Filho, who never

gives up on me no matter what, and taught me the

discipline that shaped me into who I am.

To my mother, for giving me more than I ever asked for,

and supporting all of my huge dreams with infinite

light, love, and strength.

Contents

About the Author                                              ix

About the Technical Reviewer                                    xi

Acknowledgments xiii

Introduction xv

Part I: Data                                     1

Chapter 1: Social Media Data 3

Chapter 2: From Data to Insights                               21

Chapter 3: Luis Madureira                                     47

Part II: Defining Analytics in Social Media and Types

of Analytics Tools 53

Chapter 4: Analytics in Social Media                            55

Chapter 5: Dedicated vs. Hybrid Tools 67

Chapter 6: Alexander and Frederik Peiniger 79

Part III: Differences of Social Media Networks        89

Chapter 7: Social Network Landscape 91

Chapter 8: Tam Su 109

Part VI: The Analytics Process                     119

Chapter 9: The Analytics Process 121

Chapter 10: Armando Terribili                                 141

Part V: Metrics, Dashboards, and Reports 147

Chapter 11: Metrics 149

Chapter 12: Dashboards                                       187

Chapter 13: Reports                                          213

Chapter 14: Milan Veverka 231

viii Contents

Part VI: Strategy and Tactics                      241

Chapter 15: Strategy 243

Chapter 16: Tactics                                           263

Chapter 17: Michael Wu                                       275

Part VII: The Future                              287

Chapter 18: Prescriptive Analytics 289

Chapter 19: The Future of Social Media Analytics 297

Index 303

About the Author

Alex Gonçalves works for quintly (professional

social media analytics), training and providing

analytics to social media teams around the

world from such global companies as Peugeot

& Citroen, Danone, Autodesk, and Monster

Energy, as well as global PR and marketing agen￾cies (e.g., Ogilvy, Leo Burnett, Publicis, Mediacom,

Mindshare, Havas, and many others). His global

and professional experience has given him an

understanding of the different contexts of digi￾tal marketing around the world. He has lived

in the United States, Germany, England, Czech

Republic, Portugal, and Brazil. He currently lives

in the United States, where he continues to develop his work into the expan￾sion and better use of social media analytics by professionals.

He has recently launched a website at www.analyst.life as a channel to

bring together the community of analytics professionals and enthusiasts to

focus the conversation. His vision is to integrate analysts of different fields,

from social media to business intelligence, and enable the knowledge exchange

around a broader approach to analytics.

Alex was born into the technology industry. His father created the largest

technology convention in the world at the time—Fenasoft (http://bit.

ly/2uFoQgu). As a child, Alex clearly understood that technology has immense

power for change and positive change. When social media technology came

along, Alex embarked on a journey to uncover more of its secrets, seeing it

as a new basis for everything else and as an operating system for the future.

Alex’s calculations point that in more than ten years of working with social

media, he has spoken to more than 9,760 people, for more than 24,400 total

hours of conversation. He feels that this qualifies him as passionate for the

subject, a trait that he will surely honor when contacted by anyone interested

in talking about social media, and social media analytics. So please be encour￾aged to get in touch!

You can contact him at https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexgoncal/.

About the Technical

Reviewer

Christine Berry has spent her professional career working in social media.

She is currently a product manager at quintly, a social media analytics SaaS

company. She has previous experience in social listening and publishing, as

well. She specializes in SQL metric creation, analysis, and optimization.

Christine is a graduate of Boston University’s Questrom School of Business

with a concentration in management information systems. Her personal inter￾ests include fitness, hiking, and classical piano.

Acknowledgments

This book became possible thanks to the amazing professionals I had the

chance to meet along my career, and the amazing clients I had the chance to

work with, who pushed me with their eternal curiosity. It was in the trenches

of social media that I understood how important it was to prepare this book

as a compendium of the necessary knowledge to take every reader to the

next level. I am absolutely sure that if we have worked together, either as a

colleague or as a client, you will notice in this book some or a lot of what we

spoke about.

An immense thank-you to the guests in this book who believed in me and

through their interviews offered their insight and knowledge. In order of

appearance in the chapters, I give a very special thank you to Luis Madureira,

Alexander and Frederik Peiniger, Tam Su, Armando Terribili, Milan Veverka, and

Michael Wu. I am a great admirer and fan of your work, vision, and drive.

An extra special thank-you to Alexander and Frederik Peiniger for giving

access to use and publish quintly’s analytics metrics in the book, which are

used to illustrate many concepts that we explore. They are also great leaders

and inspire me in my approach to analytics.

A super thank-you for my friend Christine Berry, who is an amazing person

and an extremely dedicated professional, for bringing in her knowledge and

insight as technical reviewer.

Eternal admiration and gratitude for the work and spirit of the entire team

at Apress: Todd Green, Susan McDermott, Shivangi Ramachandran, Laura

Berendson, and in special, for being my super hero along so many contacts in

the everyday process of this book, Rita Fernando. A very special thank you

also to Jonathan Simpson, who introduced me to Todd Green and the Apress

team.

Last, but most definitely not least, a hearty thank-you to all my friends and

family who are present with me every step of the way, in my heart, giving me

the drive to push forward and believe.

Introduction

Analytics is the pursuit of truth.

We want to find the truth because we want to make the best possible deci￾sion in the face of any given situation.

The concept of analytics is to understand all the different parts of a problem

and then be able to find improvement points from facts in the past, and to

predict the future outcome of present decisions.

In social media, we are faced with many challenges when it comes to analyt￾ics. Many of us don’t come from a technical background, and become slightly

confused by the details around data sources, integration, available data, and

data processing systems. We might not have time to constantly use all of our

mathematical knowledge either, and may become slightly confused when cre￾ating and working with new metrics to accurately measure what we need. On

top of that, social media is a field evolving very quickly, and analytics is evolving

far beyond social media and into artificial intelligence (AI).

To get ahead in social media analytics, we essentially need to cover the follow￾ing two points:

• The foundation of social media analytics: how

to understand and deal with any social media network,

strategy, or campaign.

• The broader picture: how social media analytics inte￾grates with and affects other areas of business.

This book focuses precisely on these two points. It takes you on a journey of

discovery, where, by the end of it, you are ready to tackle any project or pro￾cess using social media analytics. Naturally, as in all interesting topics around

technology and business strategy, you are able to continue your studies as you

grow further into it. The journey of this book, in relation to that, drops you

off at the point where you are ready to jump into advanced studies around

analytics. You will be prepared to understand the current state of analytics in

the world and to have a strategic view into what works and why.

xvi Introduction

To give real-world context and insight, the book brings exclusive interviews

with six global experts in fields that cover social media analytics specifically,

but also business intelligence, data integration, artificial intelligence, machine

learning, project management, and even the “human side” of things. As you

will see throughout the book, the “human side” of the analytics process is key

to its ultimate success.

The ultimate objective of this book is to shape the best version of your “ana￾lyst self.” We can truly become thinkers in the field and reach a point where

we can effortlessly approach any project with a sharp analytical mind.

On a last note, please don’t be hasty as you progress through the book. Many

concepts are built on top of the understanding of smaller parts, so even the

“simple things” can matter along the way. It is important that you can make

all the connections in the end, and truly become fluent in analytics; so please

enjoy each step of the way.

PART

Data

I

© Alex Gonçalves 2017

A. Gonçalves, Social Media Analytics Strategy,

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-3102-9_1

C H A P T E R

Social Media

Data

The Foundation for Analytics

Social media brings a very unique set of data to marketing and business

intelligence. It also offers unique ways to access this data. Many of us who

come from a creative background, or work with data that exclusively

belongs to our company, find that social media analysis is an interesting

new field to explore.

One interesting difference between social media analysis and traditional

business intelligence is the competitive information highly available on

social media. Historically, companies have mostly dealt with their own data,

and eventually added studies based on external data published by research

organizations and so forth. Even in the digital age, web site analysis and

digital advertising still binds most of the useful data to its owners, and being

competitive has never been an easy task.

Competitive intelligence and other aspects of social media data and analytics

create a new context for social media and a data-driven strategy. It is in many

aspects a new beginning, where we can revisit key concepts around the use of

data, analytics, and strategy, and make the most out of new technologies.

1

4 Chapter 1 | Social Media Data

The future success of marketing is highly based on the amount of data we

have: data about our company, about our consumers, about our market, and

about the world. The time is now to jump into a better understanding of

data, and update continuously, becoming fluent in processes that run our data￾based business.

Analytics is entirely based on the use of data, so the better we understand

what data is and how it can be used, the easier it is to understand and make

use of analytics to effectively add analytics into our business strategy.

Because we are facing new data sets on social media, a good first approach is

to quickly revisit a few fundamental aspects of data in general— specifically,

social media data, even if we are already familiar with working with data.

A Look into the Evolution of Data and the

Digital Gap

Data is information. A simple concept, in essence, with a simple ultimate

objective: to enhance any given process, to change something for the better, and to

improve upon a current condition.

Keeping it simple, while going one step further, we can see data as a storage

unit for a piece of information. So when someone hits the Like button on a

social media network, for example, that action generates data, and the data

stores this information. Technology makes use of this data—of these storage

units—to access the information they carry and generate an output that fulfills

an objective, such as delivering a graph showing how many “likes” a piece of

content received over time.

The essence of the process around the use of data is very simple. Let’s

compare it to the construction of a building or to the baking of a cake. We

are putting ingredients together to form a new product. What is complicated

is the process itself. We all have different ways of reaching a given objective—

some better than others, and we have only a limited set of data that we can

access. Even with huge amounts of data being produced, we may not be able

to access everything we need at one given time, so we face limitations in the

real world of data-based business.

To better understand the use of data in a global civilization, we need to realize

that there is a digital gap in our society, which can negatively affect our business.

It is good to take a quick step back and look at the evolution of information

generation, storage, and exchange. This gives context and helps us to decide

on the best possible path to reach a data-driven level.