How to use TrueSocialMetrics for Social Media Marketing

While basic posting and interaction on social media can seem easy, analyzing social content and understanding why some things are popular – and some aren’t – can be tricky.

TrueSocialMetrics is a social media analytics tool that allows you to look through any social media account, be it for a client or a large business/competitor/influencer, and see what their most popular posts are. Not only is it a great way to understand what’s being shared on social media in large numbers, but it’s a great repository for successful social content to use when looking for content to share on Social Media.

Let’s get started.

1. Logging into TrueSocialMetrics

2. Different Modes of Social Engagement

3. Metric

4. Content Analytics

5. Audience Analytics

6. Account Management

7. Custom Reports

8. Daily Routine

 

Logging into TrueSocialMetrics

 

1. Adding New Content/Accounts

To begin using TrueSocialMetrics, create an account with your email and password of choice.

We are going to first look at the menu in the very upper left hand corner underneath the page’s header.

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When you click it, it opens up the “Account Selector.” This is where you can store pages that you want to analyze, and categorize them how you wish. For example, if you want a category that can hold various accounts that offer SEO news, you can create a category called “SEO News” and store them all there. When you log in, you can simply navigate to that category and see a drop down menu of all the SEO News sites you added (and continue to add more, as you find them.

Adding an account is very simple, too. For this example, we’ll use MythBusters, which we want to put into our “Popular” folder, because it shares a lot of fun, interesting, visual/video content that gains a lot of traction when posted.

To add an account, first click on “Settings” in the upper right hand corner. Then, the “Account” tab.

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Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on the “Create A New Account” button.

This will bring you to a menu that asks for the account name, location, and industry. If there’s a particular category you want to place the account in, (like “Popular” or “SEO News”) type that in first in the name box, and place a forward dash in between it and the name of the account (for this example, we want MythBusters in “Popular” so we’ll input Popular/MythBusters).

It’s important that you use a naming convention that is consistent so you can find content easily in the future.  Use descriptive words in the category path.

Once you name the new account, you’ll go to a dashboard full of zeros and you’ll have to connect it to the relevant social profiles:

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For instance, if you wanted to connect to their Facebook, you’d click on “Connect Facebook,” and input the Facebook URL of their page.

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You do NOT need to have the credentials for any of the accounts you set up.  At first Twitter will want to verify YOUR social profile.

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TrueSocialMetrics just needs to be given access to YOUR Twitter credentials so they can grab data from other pages.  So simply verify and then enter the relevant page’s Twitter profile.

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Then click Analyze, and wait for those numbers to populate on your dashboards!

2. Understanding what accounts to use for what content

The great thing about a tool like TrueSocialMetrics, it that you can find the most popular, shared posts easily – but you can choose to only look at specific kinds of sites.

This means if you are looking for parenting content – particularly content that has already been preapproved by hundreds of likes and shares by other parental audiences – you can create a category called “ParentingContent” and add big parenting sites, like Modern Mom, Famtivity, etc.

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Once you’ve added these, you can use the Content Analytics app to see what posts are popular on their pages, and use it for your own social shares (we will get to Content Analytics in a bit).

Don’t be afraid to add pages all the time. New content pops up in a matter of seconds, and sometimes great sites and resources make themselves apparent. You can even get very granular with your categories if you have a lot of accounts. Like “SEOSocialMedia” “SEONews” “SEOGoogleAlgorithm”. Sources abound – don’t hesitate to catalogue them!

 

Different Modes of Social Engagement

 

While favorites, comments, and shares on content is widely “good,” each has different implications. Before we dive into analyzing different analytics for specific pages and topics, it’s important to understand the difference to truly understand how and why each audience is engaging the way it is.

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1. Likes

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Think of Likes as a social media “thermometer.” While they are more of a throwaway gesture than the other kinds of social engagement – on many social platforms, friends don’t even see someone’s “likes” in their feeds, or get any hint that they’ve happened at all – they are a good way to understand how a specific audience leans.

For example, these two posts were posted by the same company.

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The one on the left is a powerful quote about safety, history and civil rights – it got 28 likes. The post on the left details a brave young girl who practiced good safety procedure in an emergency situation. It got one like.  Using these two as guides, we can start to assume SafetyTech’s audience likes civil rights-oriented subject matters, pithy, powerful quotes that are easily shared and impactful, over news stories, cute children, and “basic safety.” This means whoever is in charge of their social scheduling should probably try to post good, branded quotes like that once or twice a week, and lay off on the little kid hero subject.

2. Comments

Comments are a little higher on the social engagement hierarchy. A comment can be many different things: it can be praise, it can be dissent, but in most cases, comments are usually simply about the individual posting. They are usually grounded in ego – so posts with many comments may have sparked a debate, provided unique information that invited input, or anything that is different, contentious, or new.

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The Facebook algorithm, for example, puts higher stock in comments, because it requires greater investment than simply clicking the “like” button.

Comments link directly back to someone’s profile, friends can usually see them, and generally are meant to instigate further commentary and feedback, and have a greater chance of being shared/linked to other friends to provide more input.

3. Shares

Shares are the social media golden goose. Content with many shares surpasses those that are liked or commented because users that share information found it to be so interesting, fun, informative, or just plain astonishing, that they had to share it will their friends. It reaches the level of a status update, as users sharing the content are sharing it as themselves, becoming a virtual spokesperson or mascot for that information.

So while this post got more likes:

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This post still got four times as many shares.

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For all intents and purposes, the latter is what you’re aiming for.

While all of these are important, it’s good to understand the major differences between different kinds of social engagement to truly gain benefit from the information available on Truesocialmetrics.

 

Metric

 

1. Metric Dashboard

When you click on the first row on the left hand column, “Metric,” the first option below will be the “Metric Dashboard.” Click on it.

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This is the basic data associated with whatever account has been selected.

There are several calculations on the top three rows. The “Conversion rate” measures the rate of comments per post. “Amplification rate” measures shares per post. “Applause rate” calculates favorites per post. There is also an “Economic Value” tab that calculates the value per page visitor, but you will have to connect to Google Analytics for that, and for our purposes, we don’t need to.

At the top right hand corner, you can also choose between which dates you see information.

The bottom four rows feature the basic numbers: The posts, comments, shares, and favorites for each social profile.

2. Relative Metric Dashboard

Below “Metric Dashboard,” the Relative Metric Dashboard  allows you to analyze the data relatively – that is, understand the importance between the size of the page’s following and the amount of likes/shares/comments they get.

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For example, if a page frequently gets 200 shares/likes on their posts, the difference between having great metrics and terrible metrics depends on how large their following is, as that would be great for a page with a couple thousand followers, but is pretty low for a page with several million.

3. Trend

The third option under Metrics allows you to see the data you have already been looking at in a visual, graphic context.

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At the top, you can choose any of the rates you were previously looking at – like conversion rate, applause rate – and judge it against it’s average performance or “moving average” which make it easy to see when a page is doing better than it usually does, and when it is doing worse.

You can also select “all” and judge the graphs altogether, to see how they are interacting.

Below, you can choose day, week, or month to see the data on different time segments.

4. Engagement/Interaction

This data allows you to analyze comments, shares, etc. by rating them by amount of engagement.

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By choosing from the options below the graph, you can select a number of followers that you want to calculate the engagement with, and decide the timeline as you did with the dashboards before. This is a perfect tool when experimenting with content schedules, as it makes it easier to look at how the page did on one week, and then directly compare how it did the next, so you can hone in on the kind of posts that succeed.

5. Industry Standard

Industry Standard helps place the page’s metrics alongside industry standards metrics. It takes whatever industry you labeled the page with at the page’s account inception, and place it on a percentile, so you can easily see where they stand in their industry.

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This tool is helpful simply because it’s easy for a Safety company to look at Farmer’s Insurance and think they’re doing terribly – Farmer’s Insurance is a large company, with a significant social following. They get an average of 50-100 likes and shares and comments on on their posts. ‘

While that’s a great goal, we know from this tool the basic standard for the industry, which gives SafetyTech a little more perspective on where they should be, when taking in the averages of other small, and medium-sized safety companies.

6. Relative Industry Standard

Like the Relative Metric Dashboard, the Relative Industry Standard also allows you to analyze the data per 1000 followers with industry standard data per 1000 followers.

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Content Analytics

Content Analytics is the category you will most likely use the most. This data directly looks at specific content and it’s resulting engagement.

The power of this section is that you can easily/quickly sort by comments, shares and favorites to cull out the most powerful content on a social channel.  Forget having to sift through page after page of Facebook update to see what performed..simply load up the page on TSM, sort by favorites/comments/shares, and in a couple of minutes you have the most powerful content at your fingertips.

Make sure you are in correct page and timeframe.  At the top you’ll see the Brand you’re investigating, and next to it, the social channel and time frame:

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Always double check that you’re analyzing the correct data and time frame!

1. Diagnostic

This brings you to a graph that shows the data visually in a way that lets you see how likes/favorites/shares directly interact. Depending on whichever item you select at the top, the Y axis of the graph will feature that information, like “Comments.” You see where all the data lies as to how many comments it received.

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But further, they use colors and size of the shapes to tell you the two other factors. For example, here, the number of favorites is relayed in color. The size of the circle relays how many shares. This lets you know that the large, blue circle (upon clicking it, it tells you what post it was) got a lot of shares, a lot of comments, but a low number of favorites.

2. Posts

This does something similar, but through direct data. The top most commented, shared, and liked posts are featured in a list.

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You can quickly/easily see posts that performed well, the ratio of link to text updates, and the popular hashtags that were used.

Beneath that, you can also view the worst posts. This makes it clear what content fell flat for that page’s specific audience, or simply didn’t engage them. It’ll teach you the types of content NOT to share on your page.

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Truesocialmetrics is like in-depth beta testing for content – it’s easy to see what isn’t working, and what is. Use that to inform all of your posting decisions.

3. Engagement/Interaction Per Post

This offers a graph similar to that in diagnostic, but instead sorts all of the data by engagement and interaction.

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This is a great tool to use to see what kind of content got people talking, discussing, and debating.   It also shows you trends over time.

4. Effectiveness

This tool deliberates what content was effective in but analyzing all engagement, likes, and shares for each post.

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You can choose any of the categories at the top to see what content was most effective for what type of engagement. When referring to the previous section on different types of engagement, this is once again important – what content did your audience generally “like”? What did they feel so intrigued by that they felt the need to share it? What riled them up enough to comment?

5. Prediction

This is a neat, almost futuristic resource. By taking all of your past posts and understanding how well audience receptiveness was to what kind of keywords, content, and subjects, you can plan a specific kind of post and see how the past analytics would judge this new post’s success to the current page’s audience.

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While it isn’t completely reliable, it can help you decide between posting one article or another – or giving you a general idea of whether it will sink or float.

6. Brand Mentions

This is a good way to see how specific entities are engaging with other brands – how many, how often, and to what kind of reception. Basically you get @mentions from OTHER PAGES to the particular page you’re analyzing.  This will help you see the types of @mentions that get attention and the ones that don’t.

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In this example, you can see that a post on West Coast Choppers Official mentioning Cisco got over 6,000 favorites!

true social media metrics dashboard

You can use this as a road map as to what you should be doing about brands. If a local dress shop frequently engages with larger companies like Kohl’s or Nike, does that seem to help them get greater visibility? Do the larger companies reply? If what they’re doing is working, jump on the bandwagon!

7. Campaign

Unless you are plotting a campaign for a specific client, this will most likely be blank.

true social media metrics dashboard

This is where you can create a social media campaign and analyze how well it’s doing, or how well it’s going to do. It’s a good tool for synthesizing a lot of information into palatable visuals, so you can easily judge whether your campaign is going in the right direction, or not.

 

Audience Analytics

 

1. Audience

This is another important tool, especially when looking for pages whose content you should share.

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Here, you can see the audience of a page’s demographic: what gender they are, where they are located in the world.

It also has a list of the most frequent engagers, repliers, shares, and likes, to tell you who the top fans are.  Detailed information on the people who like and engage with your page is valuable information in crafting your content strategy!

If you are tracking an industry site or a competitor, you can try reaching out to the people who appear on these list, knowing they are likely to engage, reply to, share, or like your content.  Make it a part of your engagement strategy to connect with people from your Audience analysis!

2. Followers

This is where you can keep track of follower numbers – by existing followers (so you can see if a lot of people unfollowed or are beginning to unfollow) and by new followers, to see if there’s a spike in likes for that specific page or if new followers are dwindling. This is particularly helpful if you’re starting a new campaign and want to see its effect on likes/following numbers.

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Account Management

 

1. Time to post

This section tells you the best time of day to post, based on when and how many people engage and at what time.

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You can even click on one type of engagement (likes shares, or favorites) to see what time of day that kind of activity happens most. This is great when deciding when you should schedule your posts to come out, as even an awesome, informative post can fall to deaf ears if it’s posted during a time period in which only five of five hundred followers are online.

(Be sure to watch the button at the top so your TimeZone is set correctly.)

 

Custom Reports

 

Here, you can create custom reports based on the charts and metrics available.  You can go into custom reports, choose what data you’d like to track, and then visit your custom report tab to view your numbers for this time period.  This is a fantastic way to pre-set the data you want to track and send it to clients or others in your marketing team.  Data you can look for includes  – as my likes go up, are my shares following? Has my recent surge in comments been effecting my conversation rate, or improving my shares?

Forget about spending hours compiling data from a million sources to create your KPI reports..simply configure it once in TSM and export on a weekly or monthly basis to analyze the effects of your social media efforts!

 

Daily TSM Routine

 

TSM is a thorough, advanced tool that can greatly improve your social media awareness and savvy. You should have a daily habit of logging onto Truesocialmetrics and using the data for social scheduling.

Choose a category to focus on.

Because there is a wide variety of different categories, pages and subjects, use each day to focus on one particular area. This means your week could look like this:

Monday: Parenting content

Tuesday: SEO/Online marketing content

Wednesday: Popular/Most shared content

Thursday: Humorous content

Friday: Your Site and Competitors

Obviously you would cater your schedule to your content needs. If you’re covering several clients that want daily SEO articles and news stories, you may want to dedicate several days a week to focusing on SEO categories, as that is the major bulk of the content you need. Because many businesses like having daily “funny” content posts – like cat gifs, funny vines, facts, etc, which have been proven to amuse and endear customers online – you may also want to do at least a weekly Funny/viral Truesocialmetrics sweep to keep those stocked and relevant. (You don’t want to miss out on the hottest cat-says-I-Love-You video, right?)

Once you’ve devised your own schedule, you will then proceed to do a sweep of that content on Truesocialmetrics to stay up to date and keep your scheduling stocked.

Daily Schedule

Choose 5 pages from the category you decided to focus upon.

You’ll want to make sure these pages are different from the pages you used the last time you did this category (if there are more than 4 pages in this section.) This ensures we’re using a wide range of information and taking advantage of all of the pages we have.

When you choose your five pages, you will go through them one by one and analyze their content. As you go through, take any visual content (infographics, photos, picture quotes) that you like and, on top of scheduling them, pin them on Pinterest as well.

Diagnostic

Start by going to Diagnostic and sorting by favorites, comments and shares.  Bookmark images that you can reshare and make notes of the types of content that performed well.  Schedule images on Pinterest.

Posts

Analyze posts that performed well and poorly.  This way you’ll learn what hashtags, post types, and content performs well so you can replicate, and what to avoid.

Engagement / Interaction per Post

Use this tab to look for content that was the most buzzworthy. Top “engagement” posts are usually those that inspire discussion, praise, or debate. These will also act as good content for your purposes, as these posts represent content that gets a reaction from people – and that is what you want. Look through the most engaging posts to see if you want to schedule any of them.

Influencers

Identify people that engaged with the pages you looked at, and add them to an “engage with” list.  You can then follow them, share their content, comment on their posts, and start building a relationship with them.

These are a few quick reports you can visit to analyze top brands, competitors, industry leaders, and of course your own social profiles.  On a monthly basis you should visit other reports and perform a  more in depth analysis, looking at elements such as the best time of day to post in a particular industry and follower growth.

Conclusion

Truesocialmetrics is an amazing, comprehensive tool that can give your social media savvy the boost it needs. Use it as much as you can, as content changes constantly, and so should yours.