All right, I'm going to go ahead and get our recording started. Welcome, our presenters, today. Molly Bacon comes to us from TechSoup for libraries. She is the social media manager there. First we're going to begin with sher ease Mead who comes to us through the Mesa public library. She's the librarian III and team lead at the library. We're so glad to have you both here and look forward to all the great work you are bringing to the session today. Welcome, Cherise. >> CHERISE: Hi, everybody, so exciting to be here today to talk about one of my favorite subjects, which is math. But do worry, we'll go easy on math. We're going to talk about social media analytics. I'm going to give you a very general overview, sort of some things to get you started, to guide you as you're starting out on this. Beyond that, Molly will take over and have some more specifics for everybody. To give you a little bit more information about myself, I am a librarian III and our marketing team lead. I started out in adult programming, a spot opened on our marketing team a couple of years ago, and I was able to join then. And our team leader left in February, and I applied for and was promoted into that position. So I saw another speaker do this recently, me and three pictures. Bottom left is me meeting the bloggist with one of my colleagues. If you don't know the bloggist, she's hilarious and you should read all her books. Top right is making a goofy picture for social media, so one of my favorite things. I'm a compulsive traveller, the bottom right is me in Mabia in southern Africa with my husband. With that out of the way, let's get started talking about analytics. As I mentioned, we're going to talk a lot about how to choose what you're going to measure. Some questions to ask as you are beginning to put this together for yourself. This is platform neutral. I know Molly is going to be talking specifically about KPIs and things like that. We'll also take a brief look at some ways that you can use excel to learn from your data. I wanted to approach this from the idea if you downloaded a year's worth of information from one of your social media platforms today, what can you learn. There's actually a lot without additional tools. We'll get started with choosing what to measure. Let me advance my slide. Some questions to ask. First one, start with why. So why do you want to jump into social media analytics, select metrics, anything like that. You could have a lot of different reasons. You could want to understand your audience better. Know who is out there, listening to you, and what might they enjoy more from you. You could be looking at ways to reach more people. So I'm confident that I'm putting great content out there, but my followers, there's just not enough of them, so I really want to expand my audience. You could want to raise awareness of library stuff, your programs, services, collections. You may want to use social media to sort of raise general awareness out in the wild about your different things. Then also to create organizational buy-in. I think this is one that is kind of top of mind for a lot of people, judging by what we've been seeing in the comments coming in from people. So we'll definitely talk about that. And it's a very valid goal. So moving on in there, you should think about where do you fit in. When I say fit in, I mean to your larger organizational goals. So all of those things that we talked about that you might want to be doing with your social media are analogous to things that you can do within your library, let me say it that way. If you think of it like what you report for your building. So statistics you might report to the state or wherever else you need to give metrics to, your city, you talk about people through the door. How many people came in, is it more now than it was then. You talk about circulation, reference interactions, how many questions are you answering. And when you look at these categories, you notice that none of these really give you the whole picture: So you can't measure the entirety of your services or the quality of a week's worth of person to person interactions given by library staff by these numbers. But these numbers are very useful. You can look at trends and contextualize from there. There are more people coming in this week than this week last year the same time. Why might that be? Why are more books checking out, less books checking out? These are all contextualize it. I think you'll find with social media metrics and analytics, as we're is going to talk about, there are some analogous things. So you can think about your followers as being people through the door. Likes, clicks, comments on a post, questions that you're answering. That's almost the same thing as a reference interaction. In many cases it is the same thing. These are all ways to frame what you're trying to look for in your social media. The third thing to ask yourself is who cares. Who is the audience going to be for these numbers you're gathering? Who cares about your analytics. When you're developing content, Facebook posts, things like that, you always take the audience-first approach. This is the same, but audience in this case isn't going to be the public always. It might be yourself. You might want to ask your analytics, how am I doing? Is what I'm putting out there working? . You may need to tell your boss your analytics, so your boss may be wondering, is our social media supporting our goals. You know, why are you spending your time on this? I'm sure some people have heard that. And your boss's boss even. How do you stack up against other libraries and departments. I know this is something I have come across in my stakeholders, not necessarily in my organization in the library but in the broader o. So how are you comparing to parks and recreation, is your growth similar, those kinds of things. And now I know what you're thinking. You want to measure everything. Because we're librarians, right? . We can't do that. We need to moderate our expectations with our statistics. Let's talk about expectation versus reality. So our expectation for our home book shelves is that we really expect that if we can gather every book, if we buy another 20, we'll be able to arrange in a really functional way, it's going to be great. Reality is that the books make it home, we end up with a great big pile. I know I do, magazines, books, whatever it is. And we get overwhelmed, right? Things get buried. How many books do you have sitting in your house that you have never read? Or that you have forgotten that you even ever had? . It's the same way with analytics. So you don't want to overwhelm yourself with trying to do every single thing. Start out small. I'm going to give you permission at the outset, no data set is ever going to give you the whole picture. Just like we talked about with general library statistics. But that's okay. And if anybody gives you a hard time about that, you can tell them it's on a slide, so it's official. What we're doing is the best we can to explain what we're seeing and not drive ourselves crazy trying to allow for every single thing. So with all of that in mind, how do we move on to choosing our metrics? I know Molly is going to go into specifics for each different platform, but I think there are sort of four broad categories that you can look on and maybe a fifth. We'll see. First is followers, and that's easy. That's the number of people following your Facebook account, following your twitter account, anything like that. Next is reach. And this is called different things on different platforms, but it boils down to how many people are seeing your content, how many unique people. That's the key. Now, impressions, again this is called different things in different places, impressions are how many times your content is displayed. So the difference between impressions and reach is that reach is unique people, and impressions is overall. So one person may see the same piece of content, the same post several times, or the same ad several times. And that is what your impressions number is going to be. Then the last thing of these four is engagement. So how many times do people interact with your content? It's those hearts on instagram, retweeting, liking things on Facebook, the smiley face, the angry which we hate to see. If people are sending messages and you're answering them, all that kind of stuff is engagement. There is a fifth metric I would encourage to you think about. I think it's often overlooked. That's activity metrics. What are you up to. If you're trying to communicate the worth of what you're doing on social media, this is something that can really help you communicate that to your supervisors. So how many times did you personally post, tweet, pin, snap, whatever it is in a given period. What's your average response time to questions on Facebook. Those are valid measurements that you can use to talk to your supervisors about your performance. And what is the work going into what you're doing. We don't just grow followers overnight. We have to work for it, and we need to be able to express the work that we're doing so that people recognize it. You should also be thinking about time frame whenever you're coming up with these metrics you're looking at. Are you looking at information about an individual post or are you looking at something year over year. Individual posts aren't going to tell you much about your follower growth, but if you're looking month to month or year to years you can kind of get a lot more information that way. So if you specify the time frame at the outset, it can really provide focus, clear starting and ending points, so you know very specifically what you're measuring. And not every measurement makes sense for all time frames. Just keep that in mind as you're sort of starting to build your catalog of analytics that you're looking at. The last thing think is really important to do is benchmarking. So this is comparing yourself versus yourself or yourself versus others. And it really is what gives you the context as you're doing this. So it's really easy get caught up, and I'm speaking definitely about myself, in the day to day. Like how is my post doing today. Are people liking this cat video I shared, are they sharing it, all that kind of thing. But really, a couple of years in, it's important to know over time if you're improving what you're doing. You can look at other libraries around you. That's a Facebook feature which is pretty cool. It's important to keep in mind. How might this look when you bring it all together? A couple quick examples. You may be saying to yourself, I want to reach more people in my community. So how do analytics support that goal? . Well, you can look at number of followers. That's a pretty good proxy to how many people you're reaching. You may be looking at that month to month, year to year, growth over time. And the aim is to be able to say something like, this year we gained 500 followers, or this account is at a 50 percent increase in followers over the past six months. That is a lot easier to express to other people or to yourself in goal tracking than like a giant list of growth over time. Your boss may want to know, or rather might be saying, we want to increase awareness of our library's collections. It's cool if you want to add the social media platform, but what's in it for the library? How do we get the word out to more people about our events. Metrics you might consider, impressions, engagement, your personal activity. This is something you might look at in a shorter term or an individual post. You might say something like we scheduled ten tweets about our database and they were retweeted 27 times. Or I created a post regarding this aspect of our collection, and these people clicked through to view. These are numbers that are concrete and easy to explain to other people. They are actually really easy to find. This is from Facebook, I just pulled a couple of screen shots. You can see there's how many clicks, oh, this is a fat marker. That's okay. Link clicks, a tweet tells you at the bottom how many people retweeted, how many liked it. You'll find those kinds of metrics on several different, or an every different platform. They just may say something different. One last scenario here, your administrator might be saying, I'm not sure I see the point of spending time on social media. Now, I have to say I've been very lucky to work with an organization that is like all in. At the city level, the department level, we recognize this is something that we need to do. But that's not the case everywhere. I think you can build a good case for yourself using a lot of this different information. So in this case, you might look at reach and your activity. And this might be a point in time. So I think one of the things that really speaks to people is the number of questions that you're being able to answer on social media. So we count the number of reference interactions we have at the desk. We count maybe the number of phone calls we have. Maybe not. But those are all sorts of things that have easy analogs on social media. I answered 12 questions, that's 12 people otherwise might have been in the door. Well, that's not a good example, not quite what I meant to say. But anyway. Or in the last seven days, our Facebook content reached, you know, 2500 people. That's a pretty powerful number. To put that in context, you can look at maybe how many people visited your different branchs, how did they compare. It's not a one-to-one comparison, but all those things can help contextualize. In Facebook, reach looks kind of like this. So you click on your insights tab, then reach is down here, and you can see for this time frame, our content reached 21,000 people. That's kind of a cool number to be able to pull out. Numbers like that mean something. You might be thinking to yourself, I can't tell if anything I'm doing is working. That's I think what brings a lot of us to analytics or to wanting to select metrics. We want to know, because we're putting our time into it, if it's paying off. And there are some really nice ways to do this. Now we're going to talk about math, and again, I don't want you to panic. If I can do it, anybody can do it. But there are a few things that I'd like to share. Let's see here. In this kind of limited time frame, I'm not going to have a chance to walk through every single thing with excel. We're not doing anything fancy, just a few where the tabs are, that kind of thing, that I won't be able to show because I don't have excel up live. I love gcf learn free to look at. And I look at it, even as a frequent user of excel, to remind myself how to do little things all the time. Microsoft support files are actually pretty good. Then if you have access to Linda . Com, there are some cool training tutorials that you can use. As Jennifer noted, they are linked from the FM page if you need to find them later. So exporting information is pretty easy on most platforms. So on this I have pulled out where to find the export data tab for twitter, Printerest and Facebook. With instagram, you can only look in the app itself and you can't get data out to work with. In Facebook, you can. It looks like, let's see here. You click down here and get this window. You can see a couple of things, we have page data, post data that we can look at, video data if you're doing a lot of video. It's a data range, and one of the reasons I would encourage you to export regularly, you can only do up to 180 days at a time, whether viewing insights in Facebook itself or exporting. If you have got years worth of Facebook data, which Facebook is like, what, 10, 13, 14 years old now. If you started a while ago, you might have that and it might be worth looking back at. You can do excel or csv, excel is just easy. Here is where you might get tripped up, and this is a trap. Do not export all page data. It's going to look something like this. Then it gets worse. I think this is 30 columns. I guarantee you will not want to look at the information in every one of these columns. So instead what you can do is set up a little custom export layout for yourself. When you do that, just make sure you give it a name. When you click on all page data, the caret next to it, this will open up and you can make a new custom layout. That window looks like this. All of those columns, that's what these checks boxes are. You can decide the couple of things that you are really interested in learning about, check those boxes. You can do multiple sheets if you want. I'm not that fancy. Then just here's where you would name it. As long as you name it, it will save it and every quarter you can go into and export the same data every time, which makes it really easy once you get it into a spreadsheet as well. When it comes out, it looks like this. So these are a few of the ones I have chosen. I probably do five or six regularly. And this is actually a good time to mention, I created a practice excel work book that you can download from the event page that has all of this in it. So you can click around, you can sub out your own data. It has step-by-step instructions for some of this. So because I can't show you live, you'll be able to see it in there. And I've spent a little more time writing that is out, hopefully to make it easier for everybody. Because I know sometimes that's hard on these cells. These are the things I showed through this example here. Lifetime total likes, that's growth over time. Daily page engaged users and daily total reach. And it's much better. How do you use this information to judge performance over time? . So if you select some of this data in these columns and put it into a graph, which the steps for that are in the work book, it's going look something like this. And this is really basic. We have our dates along the bottom. And it's plotted for each of these days, the number of people who engaged with our page. You can see the definition includes any click or story created. This doesn't tell us a whole lot, right? What we really want to know, is my daily engagement rate getting better over time? Okay, so this is January 2016. This is December 2017, I mean, I've got some crazy spikes. I might want to go back and figure out what I posted on those days. This seems like it's edging up but it's really hard to tell, I think. So excel trick number one, add a trend line. So you've got your chart. You click on your chart. Add a chart element. Add a trend line, and it comes out looking like this. Now, I changed the thickness of this line just to make it easier to see. You can change colors and everything in excel. This orange dotted line here is the trend of this data over time. And it's rising. So what this tells me at a glance is that my average daily page engaged users are increasing over time. What I'm doing is getting more effective. If it was falling, no. If it's flat, then there's no change. So that might be something that you'd want to set in your goal for the next year, I want to improve overall my daily page engaged users. You can also use excel to project follower growth. So this is the same where you make a chart, here's my chart of excel growth over time. I think I put in two years' of fake data. Not fake, but not the dates it says it is. You'll see it when you're in the work book. I can kind of guess where this is going. I thought that was a pretty good line there. But it doesn't really tell me as much as I might want. So what I can do, using that same trend line feature, add in a linear forecast is what it's called, and I get a dotted line here. This draws me a picture if I continue to grow at the same rate, here is approximately where I will expect to be on this date. I have my dates in the future. This is 2018. I just drew this yellow line up top so you could eye ball. A lot of times eye ball is good enough. This is going to be 2700 or 2600, a bad guess on my part. So that's something you can use to benchmark yourself and to look at goals for the future. I can expect that by January 2018, I'll be at about 2700 followers. But if I could keep doing what I'm doing. That's the key. So if I keep growing at how I'm growing now, that's where I can expect to be. But I want to do better than that. I want to improve beyond that projection. So I'll add maybe ten percent to that number and come up with kind of a goal that's feasible for my growth over the next year. . If you want to get a little bit in the weeds, you can also use the slope formula, going way back in math, to find the specific number, if you want to do that if your performance. Steps are in the work work book. I won't make us listen to me explain slope. Last thing is you can use excel, and I find this useful at the end of year to quickly identify top performers in a large data set using conditional formatting. This is one of the things that sounds a lot fancier than it is. Basically you tell excel to pick out the things that are doing the best. So this is an export I did, in the same way I did the page data, of posts. So as the post message you can see the type of post, when it was posted, and a couple of KPI's I selected. How many people, lifetime impressions, and engaged users. Basically what you do is select the range of data. So you would select your column. And you go to the home tab, sorry I didn't take a screen shot. Right on the home tab in the ribbon there's conditional formatting picture, and I screen shotted this in the work book. You create a rule that tells excel to highlight your data and do something with it. Icons, you can tell it to highlight, this is the top ten percent of performance in that range. A lot of different options. Defaults even are very simple. So everything that performed better than 90 percent or more in this range of information, let's make it green. You can get something that looks like. I did two different roles, one for icon, one for top ten, to show you what it will look like with different things. You probably want to use the same thing in every column. But what might you learn from this kind of information? So this I picked at random, carve asking myself this question to make sure it was valid to share with you. So this is a post here about an event we did, Halloween, like a parade for Toddelers, the cutest thing. Total reach and impressions are really good. This is, you know, not in the top, but it's not bad. But later we posted for that same event a photo gallery. A lot of people engaged with it. My guess is with this event a lot of people attended because a lot of people were interested, but they also clicked through the gallery to find pictures of themselves. Maybe that's a lesson in the future, I want to do that for events that have cute pictures of kids, because everybody likes to see them. This one here, it was an event with a photo that we used, and for some reason it performed really well, so I want to go back and look and see what made this do as well as it did. These were not great, bottom ten percent performers. Why? What was different about these than other posts? That's kind of the context I would want to go back and look at. I know excel can be, it looks more complicated than it is. I hope you find the instructions useful. You can do this afternoon this you wanted. Important thing is to think interpretation, not calculation. You don't have to find a trend line. You just need to know what it looks like when you create one, and be able the ask what's the broader context. If I'm doing this, why am I getting better, or what is it about what I'm doing that is trending upwards, a better way to put it. Last thing, I'm just about out of time but I think we have time for questions, some resources. I recently went to the library marketing and you communications conference. I think only one or two other people from Arizona there. It was fabulous. And there's people from all levels. If you want to get a little more information about it, I highly recommend going to their Facebook page. They have a discussion group. It's a lot like, oh, libraries in social media group and the AZla, ALA think tank, but mix marketing. Here, libraries and social media, that is a really great group to join. A lot of experts. These digital marketing courses, of course they are free and open to everybody, they may be more than you want to spend time doing, that's fine, but I found them interesting. Lynda.com is interesting, these other talk about design, ad week, advertising, business trends, I find them helpful in staying connected more broadly. That's it. Please feel free to contact me. I'm always happy to talk shop. You can also reach me a linked in or follow our library on social media. If you get into the work book and have a question, I hop you'll e-mail or call me. It's really not that bad to use excel and something you can very easily do. Jennifer, do we do questions? . >> Yeah, we can pause for a few questions. If you have other questions, folks, go ahead and post those in. There was kind of an overarching question early on, and I know it's hopefully getting answered as we move through the content, but I think the trick for people knowing of course the time that it takes even just to manage their social media is already huge. So obviously the time that it takes to capture and interpret data, and also the question around its reliability, I think your last comment really points to that. It may not be pure science, but I think it's going to going to help inform you. Back to the question around getting buy-in and being able to demonstrate to your leadership, what are some of the things you choose that are reliable and that really do help tell your story? . >> CHERISE: I think that goes back to it really depends on who I'm talking to. So I know maybe a year ago or a couple of years, some of your kind of city officials like wanted more social media. And kind of listening to them talk about what they were wanting, it was very apparent that what they wanted to see last much larger growth on social media. They wanted to be able to log into our accounts or look at our accounts and see a lot of people following. And that's valid. I mean it doesn't, again, nothing gives you the entire picture. But if that's what they are looking for, then that's a number now I know to use moving forward. For myself, I like to look at engagement and reach, just to make sure that we're moving in the right way. But it really, as long as you've got a finger on the general things, I think you can worry a little less about the day-to-day fluctuation. And I found that very useful. Just as one last little example, on our twitter account we recently had a month that followed two really good months for us, so looked pretty abysmal performance wise in the analytics.twitter.com, but I was able to go back and look month to month, and really in the greater scheme of a year or two of twitter, it wasn't so far out of the ordinary. So like we want to do better, of course, but it's also nice to know we didn't just like totally batch it. Yeah. >> Excellent.. >> CHERISE: I don't know if that answered or not. >> Definitely. That's really helpful. In terms of connecting the social media analytics to actual library usage, you touched on that a little bit. Do you compare with others on your team to compare whether circulation or reference analytics, do you do that kind of comparison to make that link to library usage and library materials? .. >> CHERISE: Yeah, so that's a good question. I know from that conference I was just at, some libraries do a lot more of that. I think we mostly aim to make sure that we are promoting our collections, services, things like that. I don't think with the resources that we have that we would be able to show in a concrete way that we moved the needle on circulation or something like that, because we're a huge service population, and like this is just part of my job. Like my job isn't social media. It's to be a librarian and manager and make sure the website is running and there's content on it. Also if I can make sure we have some good numbers, that is great. But what I would say, there are ways if you're spending money, especially, like we pay for Facebook ads, the other document I created and shared along with the excel work book is sort of a case study for how we track. So we ask the program attendees where they hear about the program. So we kind of have a good number of, like a percentage of how many people heard about it on like say Facebook, and we can then work out, well, for every dollar that we put into Facebook advertising, kind of approximately how many people are we seeing come to our programs that heard about it on Facebook. So that's a really nice kind of ROI measurement. I saw a question flash up about seeing if links go to the website or something like that. I closed chat because it was too much. And there are. With Google analytics it's a little more advanced. I'll throw that out there if you want to look into it yourself, yeah. >> Jennifer: Yeah, there were a couple of other questions. You had mentioned instagram's analytics aren't so great. Sounds like other people discovered that as well.. >> CHERISE: Yeah, you can't export them. Doesn't offer is us a much. Yeah. But that may come with time. >> Jennifer: Yeah. Sounds like some folks have noticed with Facebook that they were having, let's see now, having issues sorting insights by other, I think there's only one way to sort it. So sounds like you could import your import process would pull data, oh, it says used to be able to sort Facebook insights by reach and/or engagement, now my only option is by date. So would they be able to sort by reach and engagement if they selected those options in the download? .. >> CHERISE: Yes. So if you exported that into excel and formatted as a table, you wouldn't even need to do that necessarily, but you could then sort by any of these columns. >> Jennifer: Okay. And I love to see the conversation. Folks are debating which platforms to use. I know a lot of that was touched on in the first webinar.. >> CHERISE: Yeah. >> Jennifer: Be sure to check out the first webinar to think about that as well. Oh, and there was a question about monthly stats. Let's see. I wish I knew what metrics to be looking at for monthly stats in Facebook. Do I just add up daily engaged? Or is that data that they could pull from the report? .. >> CHERISE: You have some flexibility natively in the Facebook insights panel, but you can also just pull a month's worth of data. So you can display a month's worth of data in insights and just look at that, or you can export a month and sort of look at it monthly. I think Molly is going to talk a little bit more about the different types of things you can get out of Facebook too. >> Jennifer: Great. And I know with any analytics, you know, the time to remember, as you mentioned the 18-month time frame, I know sometimes I lose data because, oh, I forgot do this for the three month period that it's available. I know have you to schedule that in you want to be doing that over a period of time, and deciding how much time you put into it, how much information is it giving to you, is it better to use the built-in tools. I think you individually have to decide. Obviously something to play with as well.. >> CHERISE: Definitely. >> Jennifer: Excellent. Keep questions coming. We'll be sure to circle back with Cherise as well. I mentioned in the first session, we are watching what you all do on social media, especially on Facebook. We have been doing a series called the social life brother series. And we pull examples that you all are sharing that we notice and also notice high traffic to your posts. We selected that and we have a spreadsheet, speaking of spreadsheet, where we collect by topic and state and library. You can sort that spreadsheet and actually look and see if you have specific aspects of your programming that you're trying to highlight, you can even find examples of that and see how other libraries are doing that. So that's one resource that we collect for you all. Then I also wanted to highlight the geek the library Facebook page. Sorry, I should have been here to tell you. Here's an example of the topics that get sorted. Here are some of the top examples. There's always a lot of teen examples on your Facebook pages. Then you can see we collect them all and you can take quick looks at those as they come it. Then the geek the library Facebook page began when we were doing the geek the library project. And it's continued to grow with not just library staff but lots of fans of libraries. So it's something that we encourage you to feel free take any of the post, use them. This is something that we love to do and see the community grow. And these are your people as well. So feel free connect and repurpose any of those as well. Again, we love sharing what you're doing as well. Let's shift gears, and Molly is going to take us into some deeper dives. Let me get the ball passed over to you, Molly. And thank you so much for being here. Are you there? Not hearing your audio. Oh, shoot, not hearing you still. I can see, there you go, I'm hearing you now.. >> MOLLY: Okay, great. I'm really excited to be here and talk about social media analytics. I'm the social media manager at TechSoup, so I am constantly thinking about social media and also manage the TechSoup libraries channel. So check out both of our social media channels. At the end I'll have contact information so you can tweeter e-mail me. All day I'm thinking about social media, not always sharing with libraries, but I'm happy to be sharing with you today. So the first thing I want to go over is without a strategy, content is just stuff and the world has enough stuff. I love this quote because I think it's very true. On social media and in the world right now, there's just so much content flowing that without any type of strategy, you're really just putting things out there with maybe no one to pay attention because there's so much being thrown at them every single day. As more and more people join social media, it's just going to continue. Having relevance and a strategy is really important. Today we're going to go over understanding key metrics. I'm going to provide some key metrics I think you can start measuring right away. Some of you were asking what are some of those things that I should be measuring every month. I have some ideas there. We're going to pick some channels, going back over what you maybe learned in the first one, but based on your goals, which channels make sense for you. We're going to talk about setting goals. So really figuring out what you want to choose on social and how to do that. We're going to establish social media voice, so figuring out how to pick a voice for your social media channels and stick to that voice so your whole team and staff is on board. Some of this might be similar to what Cherise went over, she did a really great job. I'll try to not keep it repetitive, but it will help drill down. All the stuff I'll go over today is available on the social media starter kit. I'm expanding but a lot of it will be here. Feel free to download and go back and reference. First let's talk about metrics. The top social media platforms that we have go in other words from our survey, Facebook, twitter, instagram the top ones. I'll be touching on those, and also about linked in because we use that at TechSoup. I think it's important to focus on the platforms that are going to be the most effective and that you have staffing capacity for. Don't just try to do all the social media platforms. It's really not a good strategy. Choose the ones that you really have time for and do your best on those. Social media analytics. We went over this, but basically reference to the approach of collecting data from social media sites and blogs and evaluating that data to make business decisions. So it's really like everything, taking an overview of all the things that are happening on your social media and how you're doing. So to measure your social media activity, you look at specific metrics. We're going to go over some of those specific metrics now. Cherise kind of went over some of this, but going to go over really quickly. Facebook insights you can download specific things. Page, post, video data. You can also do custom reports. Any of the insights, there's a ton of analytics. If that's overwhelming, you can grab specific data points from the dashboard. Instagram, you only do metrics on the app unless you use an ad. If you're doing an ad, you do it with Facebook and you can see more metrics from that specific ad within the Facebook dashboard. But in instagram there's a quite bit of metrics you can pull but you can't download, so you need to be on top of it. Time frame a lot of times will be within seven days for how many impressions reach and views, that would be something you have to be on top of to track. Twitter analytics, you can download your tweet data and within the dashboard there's a lot. For linked in, you can also download a lot. You can download visitor data, updates and follower data. For Facebook insights, page likes, there's a big one. Your growth. Post impressions, we went over that, so just going to go over some of these quickly. Interactions, you would gather the total your total reacts, comments and shares. Page views, how many times people come to your profile. Post reach, total number of people who see your page post. Post clicks, number of clicks on that specific post. Video views, if you are doing video, it's going to be helpful to track kind of who saw it beyond three seconds, that's how they track it. Then again if you go into the post section, you can really sort by different types of things. But it is still sorting by the dates. So I saw somebody mentioned in the comments. Yes, it's sorting by date, but you can still scroll and see. All this can be downloaded. These are key things you might want to think about measuring. With instay Graham you can do total followers, interactions, profile views and reach. Then total performing post. This you can see pretty easily on the right-hand side or on the right kind of mobile view, you can see that we have a bunch of those. You can really sort by different things. You can go back a year. Twitter analytics, there's a lot of great information that you can see just within the platform. So it's pretty similar. For interactions it's going to be replace, retweets and likes. For impressions, it's the same. Total mentions would be the total times you were mentioned, so somebody doing at you're profile name. Profile visits is the total times users have visited your profile. That's really great because you can see how many people are actually coming to your profile. The top performing tweets, similar to Facebook with the posts. You can sort by engagement and engagement rate. Engagement as well is going to be the total number of times a user interacted with a tweet. So you can see a breakdown per month. I really like these right here. Even if you just start tracking these, I think they are really easy and you don't have to necessarily download into excel. But you can download all the tweet data. So if you're wondering can I download, yes, but it's just your tweet data, not analytics. >> Jennifer: Mol je, I'm going to jump in. Does the twitter have information from the beginning of account or does it expire and only a certain amount is available? .. >> MOLLY: You can go pretty far back. Not exactly sure how far. We download ours monthly. You can go pretty far back and you can set custom dates. I'm not entirely sure if you can go back beyond a year, but I think you should be able to. As you scroll through, I just compared last November to this November because I noticed it was down during the holiday times. So you can see that always in the platform. So I assume can you go back beyond that. >> Jennifer: And I know this came up earlier, but can you download instagram analytics without a business account? Or do you --.. >> MOLLY: Yeah, you have to set up a business account to see analytics. If you haven't done that, go into your profile and click the kind of settings icon and switch to a business profile. Should be connected to your Facebook page. That's the best way. You'll get notified of your updates in your Facebook page, your business page. You cannot download now, but this is definitely coming in the future, I'm sure. It's good to just go into the platform and pick a few things you want to track. >> Okay. I'm just going on confirm. Your audio is your headset, correct? I'm hearing a loop. I don't know if your computer audio is also coming out.. >> MOLLY: Oh, okay. Does it sound better now? . >> Jennifer: I'm hearing myself. I'll stop talking.. >> MOLLY: Okay. >> Thank you.. >> MOLLY: For linked in, there's a bunch of metrics as well. So you can track kind of your total followers or people that have been liking your page. The interactions is likes, comments and shares. Top updates is going to be sort of by impressions, clicks or click through rate. Social actions and engagement. And this is all downloadable as well, but you can also see it within your page. So these are just some things that I would think of measuring and keeping track of monthly. Just going back to engagement rate because each platform kind of does this differently. For Facebook it's likes and shares and comments and clicks divided by post reach times 100. They do this for you so you don't need to worry at all about this, how to calculate this. But just so you're aware this is what it is. Then with twitter it's clicks, retweet, replies, followers and likes divided by total impressions times 100. When you're seeing that number, keep in mind you want to have a high engagement rate. For instagram, the engagement rate is considered higher than the other platforms. So for Facebook, it's pretty low, and twitter is also low. So if you're achieving above these kind of averages across all industries, you're doing pretty well. We've seen one time on Facebook we got I think 14 percent engagement rate and that was totally abnormal, then even five percent would be high for us. If you're getting a lot of times a one or higher, then you're doing pretty well. So you can try to track that if you're interested in that kind of metric. Setting goals. When we think about setting goals, David van Rooy says a goal is better than no goal. A specific goal is better than a broad goal, a heard and spfshg on goal is better than an easy goal, and I like this idea. He's a psychologist that came up with a framework for goal setting, and there's a lot of things to think about and you really want to be specific. Smart goals is the thing that was invented in the '80s, and you probably heard of it before. You can apply this to social media. When you think about a specific goal, we can talk about do you want 50 followers or 500 or 5,000. What essential network platform. Really specific. I want to think about these goals as we talk about the goals, think about if they are going to be smart goals. So measurable goals, sorry, is going to be something that you can measure. Obviously this is going to be something concrete and identifies your progress, where you can really see whether your efforts are working or not. It's a number, something you can measure. Attainable, is it something that you're able to reach. So have you achieved this on your platform in the past, and is it a goal that you know you can reach. Do you have the staff and time and resources to achieve this goal. That's some of the questions to ask when thinking about goal setting. Is it relevant or realistic. I use both. Make sure your goal is relevant to your success, make #1450ur it's realistic, that you can map it out, and it's a goal you want to set, you know how you're going to get there and achieve that. Time bound, make sure it has a specific time. It's really important to make sure that you have a time frame when setting these goals, and you know exactly when you're going to have that deadline so you can really meet the deadline. Again just going back and kind of thinking about what is your library using social media for. Just kind of think about that. Then we're going to go through, we'll go back and talk about setting those goals. First I want to say where is your target audience on social. So before you choose a platform, you kind of need to think, does it make sense for me to be on this platform. For Facebook you can see the age differences. So main people on Facebook, this is a great one for libraries to be on because it reaches a lot of people. If you're in a rural area, this really makes sense for you to be on there as well because that's the highest percentage of people, in rural areas. If you have a younger demographic that you're trying to reach, I think instagram is great for that. If you have content, you can tell it's a younger crowd, photos, you're able to make that happen. With twitter, I think there's kind of an interesting demographic there as well. These three is what I personally recommend jumping in if you're going to try at least one, maybe Facebook, but if you have the capacity to do all three, I think they would be great to engage in. Then within Facebook, twitter and instagram, you can go back and see which demographic you're reaching. If you want to be reaching people in your city, are you reaching people in your city, you can actually see the city that you're trying to reach. You can see the age range that you're trying to reach. Is it more women than men, sometimes you can see ours is a little heavy with women on instagram, is we can trying and target men. You can continue to look at these. You might not necessarily want to record but you want to at least look and maybe set a goal change that demographic to be more of your target audience. Now we're going to go through an example of specific social media goals. If we're talking about the types of social media goals you want to set, there's a few that we have established. And there's a link actually that we got a lot of these resources from, so you can check out the link as well. For brand awareness, this is the most common goal that people use, social media goal, and that's because the average person spends nearly two hours every day, so it makes sense you would want to expose your brand. If that's one of the goals for you, that means you want more people to know about your organization, on social. There's also a goal for communities engagement. Do you want to build a community, do you want to have a Facebook group that you can really engage and share information and books, do you want to have a slack channel, do you want to have a linked in group. Then there's content distribution. So for this one, is there a specific type of content you want to be pushing out, maybe library information, or leading the path of neighborhood news. Lead generation, this is do you want to bring specific, gather specific information from people, e-mails to grow your e-mail list, or do you want to generate leads for your library or get people to join your specific program. Different ways to track those, so that would be tracking e-mails or downloads for a specific thing. Customer support, this one is really big. A lot of people are start to go move more and more towards wanting better customer support on Facebook and twitter and we have seen that increase a lot. So you have to say is that a goal we want to set. To track that, you might track your average response time on Facebook or the number of questions on twitter or Facebook or across all platforms or customer satisfaction scores and set up some metrics for that. Then media and press. Do you want to try to get PR or engage with journalists, reach out to people who are journalists on social, or try to engage with different influencers who might help you get on to blogs. Then tracking your appearance across social, people talking about you, is it appearing, kind of a larger presence there. Then fundraising and revenue, another great goal. Do you want to turn your followers into supporters who are actually paying for things. So maybe you set up social ads and you sign up for something, or you are trying to get people to come into the library and sign up, you can track that way. Then social listening, this one is kind of the process of tracking and analyzing what is being said about your organization, or using key words and trying to follow specific things. So if you really wanted to track librarians or live chat or specific hashtag or URL using specific key words and staying on top of the industry trends, so that can be kind of a goal as well and figuring that one out. Like I said, there's more information on all of these. So you can use that link there. Before you pick one of those goals , you're going to pick one of your channels. So this is a great quote from the New York public library. We pick platforms based on whether it works with the type of content we want to put out, and whether it meets our goals of brand awareness, increased traffic, and creating community. I think this is really important because if you don't have enough content to support the social media platform, like instagram is picture heavy. If you don't have that kind of content or know how to create that, it might not be worth your time. So really think about are you going to be able to have blogs that support the specific content goals or are you going to really have the time. So think about that before you just jump on a platform. Here is some platforms, and this is in the social media starter kit, so you can go back. Basically each platform as we discussed is going to have different goals. Based on what goal you have, go back and make sure that you have selected the correct platform. Snap chat is a little bit less used these days, I would say, now that there's instagram story, you don't need to spend too much time there. But if you already have a community there or a younger population, you might still consider it. Something to keep in mind. We're going to go through a goal example. If you are trying to achieve community engagement, some metrics to track that would be post engagement, post impressions, reactions, likes, shares or retweets. If you have a Facebook group it might be the number of post, user growth or likes on engagement of posts. If you want to host a twitter chat, you would track the total tweets and mentions of a hash tak during the event. These are just some examples. If this is one of your goals, you don't have to choose all. These are just some metrics to think about. If I were to say community engagement is a goal, we want to run a social contest at our library, and you would go through the smart goals and get really specific. So we want to get 50 patrons to participate on instagram and twitter, using Facebook Friday, and this is a popular one. You want 20 geo tags with your location, so you want people to use instagram and twitter, and you want 50 post and 20 people to check in, make their location on instagram with the post at your library. It's measurable, you can track the hashtag, why you the platform key hole or manually track natively with an excel spreadsheet, and I'll show you on the next page. You can track geo locations, that's a manual process, we'll go through on the next page. Yes, measurable, achievable because it's measurable, and we have the resources at our library. Is it realistic? If we encourage the contest throughout the library, we're going have posts up everywhere, we're going post weekly on twitter and instagram about the contest, encourage users to participate in the campaign, and that makes it more realistic, and we do have the staffing. And we're going to have a two-month time limit on achieving this goal. So here is kind of the next page, going back and tracking those things. For tracking on twitter we're going to go to the latest tab, not the top tab where that arrow is, and you can track the latest post. If you want to manually do this, have you to actually count manually I have done this. It takes time but you can do it daily or weekly. Then if you want to do the location, like I said, that's a manual process on instagr an am. You can do it on the web, rg don't have to be on the app. It will tally the total and you can see that. . In a specific time frame, it's important to look at the hashtag beforehand and make sure you know if it's being used heavily or not, then you can kind of subtract if it's been used a lot before. Then key holes, a platform you can pay for. It can be expensive but if you're trying to run a big campaign, it does all this for you. We're going to go through one more example of a goal. If your goal is lead generation. Metrics to track would be e-mails and contact information, the downloads, participation or sign-ups, clicks on lead or lead generation content. So that would be if somebody clicked to the page or any post that was relating to something that you were trying to drive sign-ups on. Then like the total conversions from the lead, did they actually come into your library, did they actually participate in an event or something like that. An example is increased e-mails obtained from downloading your free emergency preparedness checklist. Let's say you're partnering with Red Cross and you have on your website a download for this emergency preparedness checklist. Your goal on social specifically is going to be increase e-mails collected by 40 via social. So you want to get 40 people to sign up from social to download this link. And you want to create four posts on Facebook and seven on twitter with a call to action, asking people to download this kit. And it links to the checklist. So it's measurable because you're going to track the clicks to download the URL on twitter and Facebook, so that's actually done in the app, and I'll show you on the next page. You can track referrals upon downloading the checklist and ask if they heard about it on social. For this one you have to figure out how you would check it once they get to the download page. You could use Google analytics or maybe you it would be a sign-up form on the download page where you actually ask them how they found it. Is it achievable? Yes. Is it realistic? If you create compelling graphics to supplement the checklist on social so people don't get bored of it, you're going create content about the emergency preparedness that will spark interest in followers, you'll identify 40 twitter users, a pro tip, identify 40 people that might be interested and you're going to actually post an impact on twitter and tag those 40 people, and you can only do it ten at a time. Ten people at a time, you can post an image and tag them, kind of a protip to get your post more visibility. You're going to do all those things to make it realistic. Then the time is one month. . Here is how you can track website clicks. On twitter, you can click this kind of button where the first arrow is on the left-hand side, then it opens up your analytics for that post. You can see the link clicks. For this post we got 22 link clicks. So that's how many people clicked through to the actual article. That's how we would track it. Same is on the right-hand side on Facebook, you can see the link clicks or fact other clicks or whatever goal you're trying to reach. Then if you're interested in Google analytics, actually do have a waeb webinar coming up soon, but there's an article if you're trying to track URLs right there. Going back. Before you really, those are examples of goals, but you really have have to think what kind of content can your library create and support for your goals. Think about these things on the right-hand side. There's some ideas of what types of content you might want to share. You're not going to be able to do everything, so you really need to think what is possible and constantly rework your goals. Goals are meant to be set, we did a lot of them for like a quarter. It's a short amount of time. And you really need to constantly update and go back and rethink and make sure that you have enough resources and capacity and content to really achieve these goals. Really quickly, wanted to go through and talk about voice. This is something to add to kind of your strategy document. Kind of briefly, I'm running out of time here, kind of thinking of how do you present yourself. If you have multiple people on social media helping to manage your platform, thinking about your character persona, determine who your target audience is and who you're talking to, are you a trust worthy, approachable, uplifting, knowledgeable, well informed, which one of these are you, what's your tone, so you keep it consistent. Are you often funny, kind of your language, what you're using, is that something that is appropriate for your brand language and something that your audience kind of cares about. Go through each one of these and figure out kind of what you're trying to represent on social media, and make sure everybody who is on your platform is aware of this kind of this language and tone and purpose. It's going to be important that you keep that consistent so people feel like they really understand and resonate with your brand. For reporting, turn all of your goals into a social media strategy. So all of things I went over essentially, create a working document to record all of this. And put your goals, your voice and your key metrics. And that way you kind of have this ongoing working document that you can reference that's kind of your strategy document that you can tell your higher-ups or whoever you need to tell about your project and how you're working on social. This is something like I said is a working document, so you should always be reflecting and going back and changing and setting a time frame for when you will go back. So create a monthly report. So use some of the metrics that we mentioned but really focus on your goals. Add your goal progress. And record month over month change. That's what we do at TechSoup. So you can show the percentage of increase, amount of new followers, whatever you're tracking it's great to show month over month change. And sometimes it might decrease. Like I said this month in November we have noticed a decline in certain areas. That makes sense. But maybe you need to understand why that's happening. If you're more aware of this data, you're going actually be better at meeting your goals because you're going to be constantly looking at this information. And keep it consistent. Obviously if one month you're measuring followers, the next month make sure you measure followers. Each month just set the same exact metric. Then establishing how are you managing your social media, are you using only native platforms or are you using native and external platforms. The native platforms are totally fine if that's all you have capacity to do. We showed you tons of tricks and templates on how to do all of that. But if you want to learn more about external platforms, there's some stuff that kind of automates that for you. So here is examples of some kind of lower cost external platforms that you can use that help with publishing content, listening, analytics and reporting. They kind of do that for you so you don't have to worry too much about it. Hoot suite a great one, pretty affordable. We used to do that at TechSoup. There's a lot of great stuff and a whole analytics dashboard. If all of this is too much for you, you might want to consider one of these. It really des help your work flow. If it's not within your budget, you don't need to do it. You can go back and reference this. External platforms, hashtag tracking, key hole, like I said, very specific and a little expensive. Hashtag tracking when you're choosing a hashtag, that's a free platform. A that one is really cool because you can go and see how popular a hashtag is. If you're trying to pick a new hashtag that you don't want to be so well used because you want to just specifically use it for your library, you can check there. Or if you want to do the social listening, you can go back and use that. Hash tracking is another kind of like tracking tool. All of these are great resources you can go look at. Talk walker is another kind of, if you want to track your mentions or brand or PR across every kind of platform, they do have free alerts for your brand. So you can go check that one out. I know that was a lot of information, but I'm sure some of you might have some questions. I originally did have some gifts in here, so that's why some of these might be coming up randomly. Yeah, a lot of information. So if you have, after this if I don't get to get to your question today, feel free tweet or send an e-mail, and I'm happy to answer any of your questions. >> Jennifer: Excellent, thank you so much. There were some great questions. A couple of different folks are curious in terms of measuring against other libraries. I think Cherise might have mentioned early on how to track in Facebook comparing with other libraries. But in terms of just in general as well, there was a great question. Michael, who works at a statewide level, is wondering what are the best measurements for social media engagement for libraries and looking at ways for libraries to kind of compare? . I know we're all about finding those benchmarks to compare across our library communities. I don't know in terms of other industries. I know you shared a little bit about benchmarking. But do you have thoughts about some sort of classic data points that we should be tracking and that we then can compare with other libraries? .. >> MOLLY: Yeah. I think going back to those first slides that I started where I kind of put the key metrics. Those are great starting points. Trying to compare a benchmark within Facebook, as Cherise mentioned, you can track other pages. That helps you benchmark because you are able to track kind of if you know a few of your top libraries that you want to be comparing yourself to, Facebook does let you do that within their dashboard. Within the insights dashboard you can add pages and kind of see. So maybe that's something you add to your monthly report or quarterly report. I think that you can even do it manually across all the platforms, you can track followers. There is some external platforms that do this really well. There's rivalIQ and a bunch of other ones but they do get pretty expensive. There is paid versions that do this for you. They are all about figuring out how many likes somebody is getting, what kind of data they are posting. You can go really deep. But just on a kind of free level, you can kind of just set that maybe every month or quarter, you are kind of going and seeing how many followers somebody else has. And also using the Facebook insights to track pages. Jennifer, are you still there? . >> Oh, dear, I'm so sorry. Talking to myself. Yeah, that's a great question. Michael, I encourage you to post that question to the Facebook group, the social media and libraries Facebook group, because I think that's a good question to be surfacing with the broader community. One other question, then I actually saw somebody ask about the TechSoup donor program and any of the relationships you have with some of these companies. Before you transition to that, in terms of your goals, we loved the examples of your goals. Do you have recommendations for a few of the goals or using them on different platforms? How do you manage that goal setting process knowing there's a lot in there? .. >> MOLLY: Think the king to three makes sense, two or three. At TechSoup like I was saying we do quarterly goals. So for us that's only a few months that we're devoting to those goals, and we rethink it. We've kind of ask our marketing team, what about these goals here, and we kind of set our own goals, maybe corresponding to those goals. I think really this is something that's a working process. You don't need to be overwhelmed with all these goals. Really just focus on a few of those. Maybe you have a few and standard metrics every month that you're tracking in addition to those goals is like a great starting point. And going back every few months, so setting that time frame, whatever months your team has the capacity to go back and rethink, is really helpful. So you don't need to do all of them. Just a few of them. Then like I said, being consistent with the metrics that you're talking every month, I think, is a great starting point. >> Excellent. Cherise, any thoughts about that knowing that you have been tracking your own library's goals, are there ones that you think are better to focus on if you're just getting started? .. >> CHERISE: No, I think, well, I mean of course what Molly said, but I think when I took over it was very helpful to start by going back and looking at our performance, then sort of look forward to see how we can build on that. So if you have never done it before, Facebook has been collecting all this for you. So I would just pick one or two things and really go deep with looking backwards. . I think quarterly is a pretty good way to do it. We have like an annual goal sheet where we have our specific numbers that we want to hit and stuff, and e woo talk about it monthly. So that's sort of our work process too. >> Jennifer: Excellent.. >> MOLLY: And also we do do weekly, we call them weekly meetings where we look at all the top performing post each week. So it's a really short like standing meeting type thing. Doesn't have to be a lot of stuff. But I think that's really helpful to take a look at the analytics, even if it's not being recorded weekly. That's something we do. >> Excellent. All right, becomes you can see there's a good reason we have three sessions in the series because there's so much to cover. Thank you to both of you for diving deeply into the analytics piece. Just a reminder to let Molly go to the next slide, that we're continuing to collect your experiences in the survey with libraries on social media, and hoping that we can bring some of that data back to you in a helpful way so that you can use it in your organization. So definitely if you haven't yet taken that survey, I'll put the link in. Molly, we'll let you wrap up and let folks know about the amazing resources you can connect folks to through TechSoup.. >> MOLLY: Great. Yeah, TechSoup for libraries. We have our own website just for libraries. You can go check out a bunch of information there. We have tons of blog content and different types of things. Also we do our own webinars as well. Our impact, basically we give technology to libraries on a discounted rate. If you haven't heard about us. And we have saved the libraries a lot of money over time. So we're proud of that and proud to support that. These are some of our corporate partners, we have a ton of different technology that you can access through our platform. And if you want to get technology with us, you have to be a public library, and you just sign up on our website and become a member. We have discounted hardware. So if you're looking for donated desktops, laptops, tablets, hot spots. Our hot spots are really cool. Projectors and other things. If you're looking for a mobile hot spot lending program for your library, that's a popular one. If you're looking more more stuff really just check us out. I think somebody was asking specifically about our donor partners. I wasn't sure if that was a library question about social media or if you're interested in becoming, learning more about that. Check out our website and feel free to e-mail me if you have any other questions. >> Jennifer: Fantastic. And yes, a reminder that we have one more session with Lisa Bunker and Caesar Garza who have innovative things they have been doing with social media. Lisa is one of the admins for the libraries and social media. I encourage folks, if you aren't there, I don't know why I have that silly long link in there, be sure to ask any questions of that group. It's an excellent community for bringing additional questions that maybe didn't get answered today. We look forward to hearing what you are doing at your library with your social media, and we'll look forward to hearing from you between now and then on the Facebook group and then also on December 19. So thank you so much to all of you, to both of you for bringing your great work to the webinar, and to all of you for all the excellent work you're doing in your libraries and with your library social media. Thank you all, and we'll see you next month. Have an excellent time between now and then.