An integral part of my role as social media expert in the EMEA region in Experian was to analyze the performance of Experian’s social media presence. To do this I built a social media analytics dashboard to compile the data and track the evolution of several key metrics. This document was then distributed each month to the whole marketing community in EMEA:

  • Audience: in this section I measured the change in followers, fans, etc. in each social media property. We also tracked the share of traffic coming to our websites from social media. A special section was devoted to Experian’s audience in their LinkedIn company page, measuring the weight of the region in the overall follower count for that property. Several data visualizations showed the changes in audience number, the year-on-year growth and a breakdown of the audience by country and channel.
  • Activity: in order to identify gaps, needs and vector for improvement, we also tracked our social media activity. This way we could identify which countries were not using their social media accounts properly, as this number was correlated with audience growth. I also visualized the data for overall activity, as well as a breakdown by country and channel over time. Another data visualization tracked the  12-month average of activity by country, to normalize the data and account for seasonal changes.
  • Engagement: we collected all the data related to interactions with our social media posts. I tracked every like, comment and re-post, to calculate the engagement rate of our social media activity.
  • Awareness and Sentiment: with a social media monitoring tool we tracked all mentions of the brand in social media. The tool assigned a sentiment for each mention: neutral, positive or negative. We aggregated and visualized this data at a country, channel and sentiment level, to detect possible reputational issues.

The data visualizations allowed us to detect patterns, outliers and anomalies in the data. They were also useful to see the trends in the data to confirm whether we were moving in the right direction. For example, to see if actions taken to increase the level of activity in social media, like trainings, were producing the adequate results.

Social media analytics score

The dashboard also assigned a social media analytics score to each country to evaluate their overall performance. I used this score to rank the countries but also to see their evolution over time using an aggregated score instead of an individual metric. The dashboard also included a section listing the insights, recommendations and their business impact for each month. The document also tracked the performance of the business against the goals for each metric category: audience, activity, engagement and awareness.