In my social media class at the University of Louisville, we discussed this past week all about social media analytics. This was the only topic I have scheduled out for this class to spend an entire week on in class.
Most of the other topics I try to cover in about a day or so, but I felt it was important for the students to have experience not only learning about social media analytics, but also the importance and strategy behind listening and engaging audiences through social media platforms and tools.
We went over a variety of different programs including Topsy, Radian6, Bottlenose,and Hootsuite in class. In fact, everyone in class is part of the Hootsuite University program for students to get certified in their program for this class. I have to give a big shout out to Dr. William Ward from Syracuse for introducing this great program and service to me via Twitter. Thanks, William! 🙂
Hootsuite is not only a good monitoring platform to learn about, but this is going to prepare the students for the workplace by providing them hands-on training and learning with a particular monitoring platform. What better way to learn social media analytics and monitoring? I will keep you all posted on how this goes! 🙂
With this in mind, several students wrote blog posts this week dedicated to social media analytics. Lizelle discusses how she is going to be incorporating this with her social media internship with UofL Athletics and Elle discusses how cool it would be to have a social media command center (I totally agree -you have my support here on this one, Elle! 🙂 ). Caitlin also shared her thoughts this week as well regarding the use of social media command centers for brands. Jessica also shared her perspective on Facebook Insights while Natasacha discussed how she will use social media analytics for her group project for class.
In summary, I think social media analytics is not the only thing we should be looking at further in public relations or social media classes. It really should focus on looking at the main concepts we should be aware of in relations to our brand and their story. This is where social media command centers come into play – we have to have these discussions on what we are actually looking at as well as what are some of the main characteristics and factors we need to monitor and listen for.
This is actually perfect timing since this is going to be the subject for a presentation Kristin and I will be giving in a few weeks at the upcoming International Crisis & Risk Communication Conference in Orlando. While we focus our attention to crisis situations, these same principles can be incorporated and adapted to a variety of different situations and brands.
Hope you all are having a great day!
Best Wishes,
Karen
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