You don't necessarily need a tape measure to measure distances. It's possible to measure the distance between two locations using sound. Sound waves travel at a predictable rate. Knowing the velocity of the sound wave, and the time lapse between the initial sound and its echo, you can determine distance to and shape of remote objects.
How is this related to Social Media?
Your social accounts are basically social spaces. Although you may think of degrees of separation as your distance to your friends and fans, in reality that calculation is in no way representative of how close you and your connections really are. Social closeness is basically a question of how responsive your network is to what you have to say. What is the likelihood that you will get a response from your network? Knowing this gives a holistic sense of the response you can expect from your friends, fans, connections and followers.
Let's try this. Come up with a list of messages on different topics and send them to our channels. Let's take few topics on sports, politics and finance. We will then measure the response (a click) for each message we send. By the way - trying to think of response as something other than click - an impression or reach is too superfluous and will take a lot of convincing.
Our result table might look like this (expressed as % of total users, but we can also express as total clicks):
Topic | Google+ | ||
Politics | 76% | 18% | 5% |
Sports | 12% | 4% | <1% |
Finance | 7% | <1% | 9% |
These categories are clearly way too general. In real world you may want to create such matrix complete with very granular subcategories (i.e. types of sports, type of political news, etc). Few interesting conclusions based on these results:
- Twitter users are not interested in Finance.
- Google+ Users are not interested in Sports.
- Facebook users are really into Politics
This may seem like a fairly straight forward exercise, but without a tool that can properly conduct these field tests for us, the task can be quite daunting. Social Report's social publishing toolkit is quite useful here. Here is what you can do:
- Setup few campaigns (perhaps one for each topic).
- You can either create campaigns with your own content or simply take any RSS feed and use it for you content.
You can quite easily create 3 campaigns by simply using CNN's, ESPN's and CSPAN's RSS feeds readily available online. Your users will now be getting your tweets and posts complete with information snippets from these channels. What's next? Next is data analysis. We offer a number of dash board like visualization for you to play with. You can also simply download the data to excel too.
Here are also few useful links to tutorials
RSS Syndication and Social Content Distribution
Social Publishing - publish to your social channels like a pro