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Yesterday .SE – The Internet Infrastructure Foundation released their annual report “The Swedes and the Internet“. The 2011 edition is very interesting from a Social Media perspective for several reasons.

The most noticeable one is the huge increases in usage of Social Media, and the amount of people using mobile internet.

According to this diagram, the amount of people using Social Media has more than doubled since 2008. No other usage category has had that kind of growth. And as you can see, almost all people aged 16-25 are visiting social networks. What does this huge increase in Social Media usage mean? In my opinion, it simply means one thing: A lot of people of all ages are connected to social networks. Do you want to be where the people are? Thought so!

A fun fact: At ages 12-15 only 1% of boys read blogs every day, while the same number for girls is 52%!

The report The Swedes and the Internet can be found here, unfortunately it’s still only available in Swedish. Do you have any questions about the stats, or have any other comments, feel free to well, comment, or contact me!

A few days ago, we had a round table soup evening to follow up the seminar Digital Kommunikation och Trender from Handelskammardagarna. We talked about it on Twitter and encouraged people to ask questions. Joel Börjesson sent us the following tweet:

We had a short tweet exchange about the matter, which continued in a chat discussion in the evening. To summarize the whole discussion including Twitter, it went something like this:

Joel: Just for fun, since I couldn’t be there: What are your favorite methods of analyzing ROI and metrics on your Social Media platforms?

Björn: Social Media is so much more personal that it is hard to measure Return On Investment. While I’m sure you somehow measure ROI in personal relationships, do you really do it with figures and graphs?

Joel: All social media is measurable. Look at it this way. Social media is really much like any lunch you might have with a client. Say you buy that client or partner lunch, that costs you $20, but what you might get from that lunch, might be much more valuable than the lunch you just bought your client. Say for example that the conversation during the lunch between you and client result in a new possibility of doing business or a prolonged contract. Now there suddenly you have a new business plan or a prolonged contract, paying back that investment of $20 ten thousand fold.

Björn: But what if you don’t get that contract? It’s still worth something, right? How can you measure that?

Joel: Lunch just like Social media is not about the investment you do in the actual lunch or the social media implementation but what you do with the conversation or the platform that you invest in. The more conversations you have and the more time you invest into social media, the more return you will see. Social media and lunches are not about instantly crunching numbers, but more about creating long term dialogues, discussions and collaborations. By just a small investment such as a lunch or a social media tool (which you often can get for free), you can start building long term dialogues resulting in return of investments in a not too far away future. With better understanding between companies as well as consumers through dialogue, greater business decision and greater return on investments will be made.

Björn: Great points, but the question still stands: Can you really put that into numbers? Obviously, a Facebook page filled with positive comments is a great thing, but how do you decide how much a comment, blog post or tweet is worth?

Joel: While there is value to simply measuring the amount of tweets and comments you get, the real value lies in what KIND of input you receive. To turn it around, you can think about how much you would have lost if you did not receive certain messages. If you start distributing a faulty product, some people will notice it, and the first place to complain today is in social media. Had you not been listening to what is being said online, the damage, both economically and reputation wise would have been much more severe. An example of this is the Kryptonite story, where someone realized that you could pick a bike lock in less than ten seconds with a pen, recorded it and put it on YouTube.

Björn: Super! So a way to measure the value of a good dialogue online could actually be to imagine the economic loss of missing out on key information to be found there. Awesome! Thank you Joel for a great discussion and input on this matter! High5!

A short note on the quote: although Albert Einstein is usually credited as the author, he is not, according to the blog Quote Investigator.

Yesterday Twingly, a blog trackback service, launched its own Analysis feature. According to Anton Johansson, Product Strategist at Twingly, the service is targeted at PR agencies helping their clients keeping an eye on the blogosphere. So what is Twingly Insight?

Twingly Insight is not going to be a Monitoring tool like Meltwater Buzz. Instead it will give the user access to the huge database (500,000 new entries per day, according to Twingly.com) of blog posts that Twingly has gathered, and search it for the keywords you are interested in. One thing Twingly Insight provides that most other services don’t is a wide array of meta data, mainly concerning stats like trackbacks (“blogs about this blog post”), a “blog score”, etc, helping the user in finding the key influencers.

Not having used Twingly Insight (yet!), I can not give you a rundown on how it actually works, but through Twingly’s website you will find a demo version and an example on how it’s supposed to be used. It sure looks promising though, and considering how many cool partners they already have, I look forward to see what the guys are up to next!

Here are some other news on the subject:
Twingly släpper analysverktyg - Article in Swedish from dagensmedia.se
The official launch blog post – from blog.twingly.com

This week, let us take a break from the apps, services and features used to monitor your presence online. Instead, we will have a look on one of the terms you will read or hear about in reports: Reach. What does reach mean in Social Media, and how do we calculate it?

The fastest way to explain reach would be: How many people saw your message, update, movie or tweet? However there is more to it, and the way it is defined in Social Media differs among the different networks and channels.

Curtesy of http://helen-lingard.com/

Reach according to Facebook
There are two variations of reach in Facebook’s world: Organic and Viral.
When you like a page on Facebook, you will from that moment get updates from that page. The more interested you are in the page (according to Facebooks algorithms), the higher up in your news feed they will go. This is defined as organic reach. Facebook Insights tells you the number of unique people who have seen at least one of these updates the last week.

If you share a post made by a page, and your friends see it, it is defined as viral reach. Actually, if you like a post or comment on it, it might turn into a story on your friend’s news feeds. Really successful pages should therefor always strive to create engaging content, leading to news stories outside your page’s own reach, thereby increasing the number of potential new fans.

A graph showing the reach of a page I manage

An easy way to see how well your page is doing is to look at the box saying “People talking about this”. This is the number of people who have, in one way or another, created a news story about your page (and therefore creating viral reach) in the last week. According to my observations today, most pages have less than 10% of their fans actually creating a stories.

Reach on Twitter
On Twitter, there is a slight problem with measuring reach, namely that Twitter itself does not offer any proper statistics. Therefore you have to rely on third party services. One of them is Tweetreach, which I will probably write an introduction to in the weeks to come. Tweetreach works somewhat like a search engine. You enter a tweet, hashtag or link, and get a report on how many people it has reached. Since Tweetreach can not know if your tweet is being seen or not, they define reach as the total number people who have had the tweet (or #hashtag if that is what you search for) sent to their timeline.

The biggest potential with Twitter is the possibility for a certain phrase or hashtag to start trending. This means that it is one of the most used the last hour or so. With clever marketing skills, or just tipping attendees at an event about the “official hashtag” of the day, you can give your reach a boost otherwise unattainable.

Do you have any other questions about reach, Twitter or Facebook? Contact me!

This is the third Thursday in my series on the overwhelming amounts of Social Media monitoring and measurement tools out there. Awoque had the pleasure to spend some forty minutes on stage with Google at  Handelskammardagarna. Here is a post on their tool Google Analytics. Analytics does not do what MBuzz or Facebook Insights do. While those two are great at covering Twitter and Facebook, Google analytics excels at website statistics.

As with any Google product, setting up is not too complicated. You need a Google account (which most of us have today), and access to your website’s code. This is where many people might start getting nervous. Fear not. As with all Google’s products, they want you to use it so bad they have made it as easy as it could possibly be. You get the code and instructions on where in the code where you are supposed to paste it. Then allow Analytics about 24 hours to start gathering data and you will be ready to go.

When you log into Analytics, you will find a list of the sites you track. Click on one will bring you directly to the statistics that might be the only thing you care about: how many visitors your site has had. It’s a simple graph. Up is good, down is not so good.

What happened on the 20th/21st of September?

After that you can dive right into a plethora of tools, all powerful but still simple to use. An important and interesting thing you should check out is the behavioral tab. This could be your most valuable asset while planning the strategy for your blog. The behavior tab shows your visitors actions on your site, how long they’re staying and what they click on. There is a lot of information to be found, but I would like to highlight:

• the Bounce Rate (what percentage of people actually never clicks on anything on your site?)
• Average Time On Site (how long do people actually stay?) areas.
• Bounce rate is interesting because if people are actually not clicking on content, you should probably try to rewrite, create your material.
• Also, make sure that the message you want to give is actually right there on the front page, because people will not go looking for it!

83% of visitors stay for less than 10 seconds. Is it worth it to write a three page post?

This site is obviously not a place where people spend a lot of time, but the question is why? Figuring out what’s wrong with a site (if it’s not intended to be a short stop for the average web surfer) is usually not easy, but trying different kinds of content might give you an idea on how to encourage people to stay for a few minutes longer than before.

Of course information you can get out of analytics does not stop there. If you are interested, you can learn what people searched for to get to you. If someone sent them a link or if they simply typed in the address. Analytics will actually tell you what browser people are using, and even if your visitors use mobile devices or regular computers!

Do you want to know more about how Analytics work and how it might help you and your company improve your visits and engagement? Don’t hesitate to contact me!

Last week, we talked about Meltwater Buzz, and the ways it helps you gather huge amounts of data in a  understandable interface. This week we will switch from expensive to free! I present to you: Facebook Insights!

A page I manage, Insights marked for your convenience

Insights is one tool I have always used. When I created my first page and realized I could actually gather statistics from it, I understood that “this is something I will enjoy doing”. Finding insights is easy, just click your way to your page, and look to the top right.

Gathering data from Insights is almost as easy as finding it. It is obviously created to help anyone understand how many people are interested in their page. Well inside, you will find three tabs on the left hand side: Overview, Usage and Interactions.

• The Overview section provides the data that most people are interested in: How many people like your page, how many times your updates have been viewed, and how many comments and likes they’ve gotten.
• Moving on to the Usage section, things get a lot more nerdy interesting! Want to know exactly what your fans are actually doing on your page? Of course you do! A dedicated graph will tell you how many people watched your posts, commented, and liked them. Another one shows how many views your videos have gotten, if people clicked on your photos, etc.
  Last but not least there is demographic information, which is great use to decide whether your page’s updates should be in Swedish or English, for example:

67% male fans? What is this, a football magazine?

• Finally, we’ll have a look at the Interactions tab. This is probably one of the most valuable sections for page owners, wether commercial, non-profit or otherwise. The main part of this section is the Page Post list. All updates your page has done is in this list, and you can sort it for number of views, feedback percentage and date posted. Now why is this good? Well, most people working in Social Media, including Facebook itself agrees that engagement is king. You do not want fans that just mindlessly look at what you are doing (that’s what billboards are for!).

To succeed in Social Media, you want to speak WITH your fans not TO them.

Do you want to know more about how to engage your fans? Contact us!

On Thursdays, I will give you a review, a tip or just my thoughts on research and analysis, which is my main responsibility working at Awoque. If you have any questions about how it works, and why you should always keep track on your presence online, feel free to contact me!

Meltwater Buzz is one of the most powerful tools out there today, allowing you to search for keywords and/or hashtags in pretty much any media. Micro blogs (Twitter), regular blogs, videos, photos, it’s all covered! Setting up a campaign (a set of keywords) takes about five minutes, and feels like searching on Google, only more… powerful.

In the “Overview” tab, you will see the latest tweets, blog posts, pictures etc that follows your search criteria on the right hand side. To the left, you get stats and graphs, all customizable to your hearts delight.

Reporting your stats is obviously a key feature of any monitoring service. MBuzz does this through a simple-to-use report wizard. You choose what campaign you want a report on, decide which stats you want to show and, with the help of check-boxes, what kind of charts and graphs you want.

A downside to this tool is that it is sometimes too powerful, especially if you are only running a local campaign. You might get data that you don’t care about, for example from other countries (MBuzz actually translates content as well!). Luckily you can limit the search to only include certain countries and languages. Another downside is the price, which for a startup or small company might be too high. But as I mentioned earlier: this is a powerful service, created for big brands to keep track of everything that happens.

Have you used Meltwater Buzz? What do you think about it? Tell me in the comments, or on our Facebook page!

Earlier this year Stall Rustorp a company that sells horse riding products online, contacted Awoque to help market their web and e-commerce site through social media.

Stall Rustorp, is located in the beautiful Swedish countryside approx. six kilometers from Trollhättan and they are passionate about horses and their well-being. The first challenge we had to address was that their website and online store did not communicate this at all. Stall Rustorp, desperately needed a new image and a more user-friendly online strategy to get their message across.

In order to deliver against the brief, Awoque undertook a comprehensive analysis of Stall Rustorp’s business and we reached out to the online horse riding community, valuable key influencers and fans. The result was concrete ideas (and input) on how to get key messages across, a better understanding of the community and their social media channels of choice.

This valuable information was used in the redesign of Stall Rustorp’s entire web and e-commerce site. The new design not only gives Stall Rustorp a modern and fresh look but it also reflects the values of the horse riding community. Another key item was to move Stall Rustorp to a blog friendly platform to promote much more engagement with customers and fans.

“The goal for Stall Rustorp was to create a modern, user-friendly website, whilst making ourselves more available through social media. Awoque has not only helped us create these conditions but pinpointed what needed to be done and made it happen. We now have a very beautiful web site that appeals to our customers and a social media strategy to engage with our fans. We are extremely happy and believe that we have a bright social future.” says Johan Söderlund, CEO. Stall Rustorp.

We too believe that Stall Rustorps has a very bright social future, they have the tools, a new web/e-commerce site that gets across a simple but powerful key message – their love of horses; and a community of passionate fans to engage with.

#High5

How do you measure your results? Do you know from what sources your fans find their way to your page? How much time the fans spend looking around? These and many more features, can be measured and tracked with Google Analytics.

Most online activities can be measured and analysed in more detail than traditional offline media. This is why I love the online industry. I like the fact that we can prove a point, show where we have created traffic and interest for a various set of clients. We can tell them where their fans can be found, how they move around on the blog/site, find them around the globe, show points of interest etc. For clients with excisting sites, we can build and relaunch more social websites based on facts.

Driving and measuring traffic includes many various aspects. During the spring, we will continue sharing some of our thoughts on the matter and share customer cases. Please ask us questions.

Tonight I got a happy image when I saw this summary for one of our clients during the past week, the blog from World Transplant Games.

What can we do for you?

We proudly announce that we love the web. We love great people who run events with a passion - planned from the heart to create one of the best events that most likely takes place this year in Göteborg. Webcoast is an unconference where everyone participating adds flavour to the program.

We look forward to interacting with a great set of minds that know the latest trends within social media, online communication, analytics, smart technology, strategy and so much more. If you got curious, I suggest you join us March 18-20 at Lindholmen. See you there .