In social media we have no shortage of data; our key challenge is to understand the data and to create insights that will help us improve what we do. Generating actionable insights from social data has been the core focus of the Zuum team. This week in the SMToolbox, we take a look at their tool and how Zuum's reports and analytics can benefit social media marketers.
Zuum bills itself as a social content strategy tool; in essence, it is a social analytics tool, but with a difference. The Zuum team are really focused on helping you to understand what causes things to happen in the social world. Thus, if you see a spike in engagement or rapid growth in followers, Zuum will help you identify what caused these particular changes. Zuum also allows you to compare your company's performance with that of other brands and gain insights that will help you improve your own performance.
Organizations using Zuum include advertising agencies such as Ogilvy, JWT, BBDO, Edelman, and Initiative, as well as brand clients such as Nissan, Disney, Billabong, Universal Music and USC.
Overview of Zuum Reports and Analytics
The analysis and reporting in Zuum takes a number of forms. There is a global leaderboard, and then there are reports for each main social network. Currently Zuum does not support LinkedIn, which might be a limitation for B2B marketers; however, it provides extensive analysis and reporting of the other main networks, such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google Plus, Instagram and Pinterest. The reports for each network fall into three main reporting areas:
- Benchmarking
- Content Publishing
- Community
I have outlined some of the key features in each of these three areas to show how Zuum helps you draw actionable insights from the data.
Benchmarking
Zuum offers a range of benchmarking reports which will provide a clear analysis of where you stand relative to your competitors across a range of indicators.
Below is an example leaderboard report. You can quickly see the average scores for items such as fans, growth rate, engagement and community involvement and the relative position of your company and your competitors.
The benchmarking reports also include share of voice reports such as the one below which make it very easy to visually assess your share of voice based on fans, engagement, new fans etc.
With Zuum you can also track activity over time. If you see spikes in activity such as the degree of engagement you can instantly click through to see the posts which caused that particular spike in activity and why. The tool is very much focused on helping you to understand what caused something to happen.
Publishing
In the publishing area you can view posting activity and engagement rates. Zuum has a unique interface for viewing posting schedules, which is set out below.
The interface makes it easy to see at a glance the posting schedule used by your competitors for a particular network. It is again a good example of how Zuum tries to help you draw insights from the data.
You can also run reports to see what type of content engages people such as videos and produce ranked lists of individual posts by engagement rate.
I particularly like the post engagement history. In essence, you can analyze engagement for any post over time. The ones that I saw tend to reinforce my experience that the majority of engagement takes place in the first 24 hours and then flattens off quite quickly. See the example below.
There are examples, though, where active promotion can extend the engagement profile for a few days, as shown below. It is very valuable for social marketers to understand these trends and how the life of a post can be extended to generate greater reach and engagement.
I think these are thoughtful examples of reporting that help you to generate insights and think through actions that can improve performance.
The final feature in the content publishing section I want to highlight is the subject analyzer. This runs detailed reports for items like hashtags, as shown below. You see the content types associated with the subject and the words used as well as the volumes and top posts.
Community
In the community section you can access many different reports on your community and check on the overall health of your community. For example, you can run reports on the number of fans/followers by country, the number of daily visits, your key influencers, and so forth.
Zuum also has an integration with Google Analytics that allows you to go beyond Google's social statistics and understand the impact of social activity on web traffic. For example, you can correlate social engagement to web site visits.
The community section also has an image photo wall where you can see the images posted by fans and followers. This provides a nice way of curating community content.
In the community section you can also analyze responses from brands, including response rates and response times to posts. In the example report below you can see how brands are responding to specific questions or comments.
Summary
Zuum offers you extensive social and content analysis, enabling you to undertake campaign analysis, examine viral topics, view competitive strategies and analyze your own community including your top influencers. All of the data is exportable to a range of formats, including CSV, PDF, PNG, and JPG. Zuum data can be delivered via email in automatically generated daily, weekly, or monthly reports.
What is particularly impressive about Zuum is their focus on what works in social media, such as what type of content generates particular responses; these insights can be used to help businesses maximize engagement with their community.
Try Zuum for yourself with the 7-day free trial available at the Zuum website.
Column logo by Marie Otsuka.