How to Leverage Big Data to Optimize Your Social

Neal Schaffer: 0:04

Welcome to maximize your social actionable 10 minute advice on how your business can maximize your social media presence. Now, the host of maximize your social social media author, speaker, consultant, and founder of maximize social business, Neal Schaffer. Hey, everybody, this is Neal Schaffer. And welcome to a another edition of maximize your social hope you're enjoying your summer. Still hot here in Orange County, California, I don't know when the heat is going to end. And because we go to a school on a year round schedule, our kids are already back in school. So we're very much back in the back to school mode. And with social media, it's also back to school as well. Hopefully, by the time you heard this, I will have already published my annual although it's been a little while since about my annual best social media books blog post, you can read all the blog posts you want. But there are plenty of books out there that go deeper on concepts, ideas, just in general thinking. And I think the back to school time is always a great time to look at our options, and really delve into some great books. And, you know, get to the next level wherever we are in our social media. So today, I want to talk about how to use I know this is gonna sound compelling, it's actually a lot easier than it sounds, but how to use big data to optimize your own social media, whether it is for your business brand, whether it is for your personal brand. And one of the keys here is you need to have a tool that allows you to analyze and allows you to compile all of that big data. And I say big data, we're not talking about, you know, terabytes of data here, pulled from the cloud, or, you know, Google servers, we're talking about data that we're accessing, from social media, on how people are engaging with our social media accounts. So two things we need here. Number one is we need a tool, we need a tool that has really, really good analytics. If you read my six social media productivity tips with 23 tools, I already mentioned some of these tools. Right now, if we were going to talk about certain networks for your website, and Google obviously have Google Analytics, right. For Facebook, we have Facebook Insights for Twitter, my preferred tool actually is Sprout Social. Looking across some of the other networks. For Pinterest, my preferred tool is tailwind. We also have something called simply measured, which is more of an enterprise grade tool, which covers all of the social networks. And recently with LinkedIn, I've been playing around with a tool called up to post which can be used for other platforms as well. And I, I should add that Sprout Social can be used for Facebook and LinkedIn as well. And then we have buffer and HootSuite in the other dashboards that have analytics. But once you have your preferred tool, now you need a preferred network. And what I mean by a preferred network is, if you have one network that you can use as your experimental testbed to try to get ideas as to what sort of content engages your audience, it's going to help you optimize your content across other platforms. Now, if you have unlimited resources, you obviously want to be optimizing your content according to each platform. Because each community is different. And they will all have different needs, right? That goes without saying, but if you want to just sort of an easier way of applying big data to optimize your social media, I say pick one network, pick the one network that not only do you see the most engagement on and when I talk about engagement, I'm talking about clicks is I think the best engagement if you're sharing links, if you're not sharing links, and you're primarily sharing photos, it's going to come down to like or maybe comments, but also a network in which you post frequently. And the more frequent you post, the more the bigger the data set you have to work with, the more you can really see which are the posts that come to the top when it comes to content that gets clicked or liked or commented on. So I already mentioned a few tools. I want to give an example of what I do. When I use Sprout Social for my Twitter, I share an incredible amount of content on Twitter. Twitter is my newsfeed it's where if I find something, whether it's a infographic on Pinterest, the latest news, a blog posts from maximize social business that I want to share, sometimes I'll share some from the archives, because I think there's a lot of evergreen content in the blog. I will put it out there and I'm really sort of testing the waters to see what my followers like in terms of content, right. And at the end of the day, those that get the most clicks and I guess you could use retweets I like clicks. I want to know which are the headlines that actually drive people to click on something because if I can understand that, I can apply that same knowledge to my other social networks. So if I use Twitter as my anchor, I can then figure out well, these are for given week, these are the posts that I seem to get a lot of clicks on, I should not only be optimizing my own content, to try to improve upon that. But what I can do now is apply that knowledge to my other social networks, in fact, that can even go beyond that, and apply it to my own, for instance, email marketing, where I share a lot of content, if you subscribe to the maximize social business newsletter, which I hope you all do, you're seeing a combination of the most popular recent blog posts for maximize social business according to Google Analytics data, combined with some popular tweets that I have sent out according to Sprout Social data. So what I'm trying to do is really put my best foot forward and say, This is the content that my fans, my followers have said, is the most engaging. And it's interesting, because obviously, there's some things that do better on Twitter than other networks. But it does give me an educated guess as to what content I should be sharing Well, guess what, I can now apply the things that I share on my email newsletter now. And I try to share seven or eight things. Well, you know, one post a day, there is sort of a weekly content curation posting schedule, for my Facebook fan page for my Google Plus brand page. In my newsletter, I also include one pin one infographic a week, or that comes from my tail in analytics, she begin to see how if you have an anchor network, and I talked about two anchors, their Twitter and Pinterest, because I do see this big interest in infographics. In addition to just links, you begin to see and also my website with Google Analytics, but you begin to see how there's a lot of data that you already have access to a lot of analytics and you know, you can try to tweak it to try to find out what's the best day to post and what time to post. I think the content and analyzing the content that works, especially if you're curating a lot of content, each piece of content that you curate is not only helping you establish your thought leadership, but it's also testing the waters for content that's people will engage with and will maybe that's content that you should also start creating. So from content curation, to content creation. And this all comes about, because we are leveraging big data with a social network with the right tools. So I tried to explain it as easily as I could, you will probably see me write a blog post on this the next two or three weeks where I will be a little bit more clear. But hopefully this makes sense to you. This was one of my quicker, maximize yourself. So podcast, I do like to keep it real short, simple and sweet. So until next week, hope that if you liked this podcast, share it with your friends. And if there's something you want me to cover, please feel free to reach out to me. That's Neal Schaffer on almost any social network imaginable, or maximize your social.com or maximize social business.com. And if you are curious, I'm not sharing this with anyone else. I actually had surgery this week. It was a elective surgery. So it's nothing critical. Just something I didn't bring up in any of my social networks and only sharing it with you on the podcast. So if my voice sounds a little weird, it's because of that, but no worries, I'm healthy, and I feel great. And on the road to recovery. Hopefully by the next podcast, my voice will be completely normal. But until then everybody wishing you the best of success with your social, hey, if you implement my ideas, let me know how it goes. I'd love to hear about your experiences. That's it. Until next week, everybody make it a great social day, wherever you are in the world. Bye bye.

Unknown: 8:49

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