Many social managers struggle with tight budgets and expensive third party data insight tools. This presentation uncovers freely available social analysis tools that can be easily automated to provide insights for social engagement, social reach, social geolocation targeting, and competitive benchmarking.
7. @aaronix
Usability Focused Paradigm:
Know Thy User
Through automated/manual hybrid tracking,
visualizations, and analysis
• Social Influence (NetVizz / Gephi: GraphML / NodeXL with Social Importer Plug-In)
• Social Reach (FQL/Twitter Search API v1.1 & OAuth/Google Docs)
• Social Engagement (Click Tracking & Heat Maps)
• Social Geolocation (Traffic Data / Google Fusion Tables)
• Competitive Advantage (NetVizz / GraphML)
The effect that an individual’s thoughts and actions has on others
The extent of an individual’s effect on others
The involvement of others resulting from an individual’s contribution
The location of engaged involvement
Benchmark insights into how competitor’s social communities thrive
8. @aaronix
Social Influence
NetVizz / Gephi: GraphML / NodeXL with Social Importer Plug-In
NetVizz is a free data extraction app for Facebook sections (groups & fan pages)
Creates a .gdf formatted file that can be imported into GraphML
9. @aaronix
Social Influence
NetVizz / Gephi: GraphML / NodeXL with Social Importer Plug-In
Gephi (open source) enables the creation of insightful visualizations that help
content curators gauge key social influencers and level of engagement through
GraphML format. Algorithmic correlational inferences may be analyzed.
10. @aaronix
Social Influence
NetVizz / Gephi: GraphML / NodeXL with Social Importer Plug-In
Uses repulsion, centrality, clustering coefficient and modularity algorithms to
help identify associations between nodes (variables) and edges (dependencies).
11. @aaronix
Social Influence
NetVizz / Gephi: GraphML / NodeXL with Social Importer Plug-In
Similar to NetVizz, except for data extraction from Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, and
Facebook personal network and fan pages (not groups).
12. @aaronix
Social Influence
NetVizz / Gephi: GraphML / NodeXL with Social Importer Plug-In
Important Considerations!
• NetVizz exports to .gdf, not graphml format
• NetVizz data cannot be exported into NodeXL, or vice versa
• NetVizz data does not include user comments posted
• As a result, use NodeXL to conduct sentiment analysis
• Facebook only returns up to 500 names from a group
• As a result, the extracted group followers are somewhat random
• As a result, a network view of a group is limited
• Twitter only returns up to 100 friends
• Sample population results are still significant and representative
of the normal distribution
13. @aaronix
Social Reach
FQL: Graph API / Twitter Search API v1.1 & OAuth / Google Docs
Analyzing social reach data (such as social referrals, engagement, and followers) will
enable key stakeholders to determine which social vertical channels are lagging or
leading so tactics can be determined and applied to increase engagement.
14. @aaronix
Social Reach
FQL: Graph API / Twitter Search API v1.1 & OAuth / Google Docs
FQL (Facebook Query Language) is quick (450ms avg. per query response time)
alternative to extracting substantial volume of FaceBook data stored in Insights
dashboard through Graph API.
15. @aaronix
Social Reach
FQL: Graph API / Twitter Search API v1.1 & OAuth / Google Docs
Create a social inventory list in Google Docs, including ID. Export the list to .csv or
create data bind to list. Include sessionized Graph API Access Token. Setup array to
query each parameter. Then dump results into exportable .csv file. Push results
through Google Charts API to create automated dashboard reportlets.
16. @aaronix
Social Reach
FQL: Graph API / Twitter Search API v1.1 & OAuth / Google Docs
• Facebook Graph API Acces Token is sessionized with an expiration of 2 hours before
time out error is generated with no results.
• Either manually copy/paste the Access Token into web-based input field, and store
result in a variable that gets plugged in and evaluated, or…..
• Use a JSON query to automatedly pull the Access Token provided you can supply
the Client ID, Redirect URI (Your Post LogIn URL), and authentication App Secret
• Your PHP scripts in your automated batch process can only access your Google
Docs spreadsheets provided you’ve first set your file to make it public, and receive
a link to share.
• Use a JSON query to decode and iterate the entries in your array using a foreach
loop.
Important Considerations!
17. @aaronix
Social Reach
FQL: Graph API / Twitter Search API v1.1 & OAuth / Google Docs
Suggested Variables for helping determine Social Reach include:
•page_fans – total number of people who have liked the page (likes)
• page_storytellers – 28 days people talking about this (shares)
• page_stories – 28 day page stories (comments)
• page_impressions_paid – 28 day paid reach (paid reach)
• page_impressions – 28 day reach (reach)
Important Considerations!
18. @aaronix
Social Engagement
Click Tracking & Heat Maps
Provides insight into how users are interacting with site content by link position, not
by URL (for dynamically positioned content that moves relative to time range or
trending popularity).
19. @aaronix
Social Engagement
Click Tracking & Heat Maps
Steps to create custom heat maps:
1. Assign Click Tracking Variables
2. Export CSV Data Dump for Entire Month (200K+ rows)
3. Dump CSV into Excel and create pivot table
4. Group by Row Label to aggregate totals
5. Establish % CTR from # of clicks / total clicks
6. Normalize measure with % of Total (100% max)
7. Map positions in layout by targeted variables
8. Apply 3 tiered color gradient based on % thresholds
Important Considerations!
20. @aaronix
Social Engagement
Click Tracking & Heat Maps
Important Considerations!
• A Visual Basic (VB) Macro may be used to create automated process for
Extract/Transform/Load (ETL) emulation routine.
• An executable VB Controller (shell script) may be created in Visual Studio to
invoke the Macro automatedly.
• Task Scheduler can then be used to target the executable on a recurring cycle.
• This process only tested for Heat Maps based on static link position.
21. @aaronix
Social Geolocation
Traffic Data / Google Fusion Tables
Show density data visualizations by exporting traffic or campaign data correlated to
location from Adobe/Omniture, Google Analytics, or other into Google Fusion
Table, then establish markers or by imported coordinates (KML shape files).
22. @aaronix
Social Geolocation
Traffic Data / Google Fusion Tables
Show density data visualizations by exporting traffic or campaign data correlated to
location from Adobe/Omniture, Google Analytics, or other into Google Fusion Table,
then establish markers or by imported coordinates (KML shape files).
23. @aaronix
Social Geolocation
Traffic Data / Google Fusion Tables
Important Considerations!
• Embed FusionTablesLayer object into web based dashboard with Google Maps
API.
• Fusion Tables is a designated data source for Google Chart Tools.
• Authenticate with OAuth to gain access to your Google Fusion data.
• Only five Fusion Tables Layers may be added to a map.
• Up to five styling rules may be applied.
• Only the first 100,000 rows are mapped from query results.
• Total size of data set sent in single API call cannot exceed 1MB
• If using KML shape files for city lines, a cell of data may only support a
maximum of 1 million characters
