The innards of a Social Media Analytics report

I work with a lot of different social media listening and tracking tools and while some posses a freak ability to be able to briskly skim through blog posts and Twitter searches, most clients would cringe at the idea of sifting through tons and tons of both relevant and junk information. This is why clients are clients and I’m sitting in front of a computer lurking Technorati.

Since most people are dumb-dumb’s its good to make your report as straight-forward as possible. Here’s a list of great ways and essential things to communicate and display information you get from your social media monitoring tools.

1. Collective Volume - all related activity (mentions) in social media across all platforms.

2. Mentions in Blogosphere (Twitter, etc.) - Volume in a specific social media area of interest (perhaps you were targeting bloggers for outreach).

3. Share of Voice – My favorite graph, and probably one of the most important. The data shows where the buzz is happening (and where you need to focus efforts).

4. Audience Sentiment – Your clients will heart this one so hard.

5. Word Cloud – This is the prettiest one of all, and quite possibly the most interesting.

There are a lot more ways to interestingly serve data but keep in mind that a lot of times, its better to just get to the point. Take this and do what you will. I made everything in Numbers, the word cloud in Wordle.