Final: Social Media Analytics on Massachusetts Department of Agricultural Resources
Social Media Marketing:
The world of marketing is vast and
constantly evolving, especially with the emergence of new technologies. With the
era of social media has come a new way to promote not only our personal lives,
but also our businesses. Social media marketing, a new technique that has
arisen in the past two decades, has taken over as the up-and-coming way of
marketing and promoting products and services. If understood and managed
correctly, social media platforms can yield valuable data and insights about
our customers, that we might not otherwise be aware of. This data can be
collected to enhance our campaigns, grow our sales, and improve our bottom
line.
The most popular of
today’s social media platforms (in the U.S.A) include Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, Snapchat, Reddit and Pinterest. While these platforms allow for
similar actions such as the creation of a unique profile, publishing content,
liking other content, commenting on other content, sharing content, direct
messaging other users, and interacting with other users, they are all unique
and have individual challenges when collecting and analyzing data. Some of
these differences include data accessibility, the interpretation of the data's value, and the distribution of the content.
When
thinking about launching a social media campaign, it is important to think about
your goals and the metrics that are needed to perform an analysis so that
success can be measured. Metrics are especially useful in measuring the
interactions on a piece of content over time. According to Alex Goncalves (2017), metrics is a collection of data that is
compiled to meet a goal. By looking at the patterns, we can see trends
of engagement emerge behind similar content or certain pieces of
content put out with similar features, such as post type, imagery, links, and
level of interactivity. By successfully tailoring our brand messaging, we can
aligns it with the ideals of our consumer culture to optimize engagement on our
brand’s content and know how to readjust when our content is not performing
well.
Social Media Analytics:
So what do we do after we have deployed our campaigns and collected valuable metrics? We must put our analytic hats on and analyze that data, patterns and other meaningful information gathered throughout our campaign. Some of the most common things that are included in social media analytics include content that the channel publishes, interactions related to the published content, number of followers and the information about those followers. Many social media platforms have their own tools for measuring data and generating fundamental insights for businesses to track growth. These tools can provide information such as audience size and growth, all content published, all interactions to published content, top interacting followers, timed view of metrics (hourly, daily, weekly, monthly) and the bench-marking data against competitor channels (Gonçalves, 2017).
Looking
beyond native tools, we can find the technique of social media monitoring
which, like a Google search,
uses a keyword-based search to discover mentions for a brand and performance
reviews of your content. Although this method is only a sample, and not a total
collection of every single mention of the brand, it is enough to provide
actionable points and insights. In the end, a good social media monitoring tool
is judged by the length of its reach and the amount of additional insights it
can provide beyond the native analysis provided by the social media
platform.
My Social Media Marketing Campaign:
Brand: Massachusetts Department of Agricultural Resources
Social Media Platform: Facebook
For this social
media marketing campaign, my supervisor and I decided to focus only on Facebook
since that is the main social media platform we monitor and focus on as a
division (and that is the one that I help manage so it makes sense for me to
learn best practice for Facebook). I have a wide-ranging of understanding when
it comes to Facebook works, as I have used it personally for the past ten years
and professionally for the past seven years.
In my opinion, Facebook
is arguably the most effective to use for marketing and promotion. Not only
does it include built-in advertising tools and opportunities, but it also allows for a
business to connect with a wide range of diverse audiences. According
to McDonald (2019), the
following are five reasons as to why Facebook is so effective: (1) it is the
largest and most popular social media platforms with approximately 2 billion
active users, (2) once a user understands the dynamics of Facebook, it is easy
for them to understand other social media platforms (like Instagram and Twitter),
(3) Facebook rewards pages for posting high quality content that generates a
lot of interaction, (4) Facebook has an extensive, international reach which
makes it a great advertising and marketing platform, and finally (5) Facebook
is fun to use and allows you to grow your online community.
Goals:
When
first approaching this project, I thought about the goals for my campaign and
the overall goals of the Marketing Division in the department. We have two
audiences that we market to: the consumer and the agriculture industry.
Different messages have to be conveyed to both the consumer receiving news on
what is happening in the world of Massachusetts agriculture and the ways that
they can support ongoing efforts and the industry receiving news and
information on big news that is effecting the industry and assistance programs
that can help agricultural business continue to thrive and grow. Since our page
is a mix of these two elements, I wanted to think about the ways in which we
release not-so-exciting information like press releases and class offerings and
possible ways to liven it up and make those posts interesting and
engaging.
Armed
with the information that the posts with the highest levels of engagement have
provocative imagery, interesting text, and links to further information or
graphics (like videos, articles, blog posts), I decided that I would try to use
imagery and links to increase engagement on 5 posts throughout a two week
period (McDonald, 2019). In
doing this, I hoped to generate more engagement on upcoming press releases and
class announcements as well as boosting engagement on posts from our
Commissioner John Lebeaux.
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Campaign Posts:
The MDAR Facebook page,@MassDeptAgr,
was created in March 2017 as a government organization page. To date, the page
has 1,246 likes and 1,361 followers, along with a 60% response rate and a three
day response time. Since this is a government run page, I couldn't do everything that I wanted (a Facebook Live video) and I had to make sure certain information got out and events got promoted per the Commissioner's office and our other marketing staff.
First Post:
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| The first piece of content was posted on November 22, 2019 at 10:08 am in Medway. I attended a meeting for the Massachusetts Beekeepers Association and was asked to do a post with information about the event. I wrote an informative posts with tags and links to additional apiary information, including where to find local honey in the state of Massachusetts. I also took pictures and posted six of them including a staff group shot, images of Massachusetts' honey and the baked goods contest. 🐝 |
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| The second piece of content was also posted on November 22, 2019 but at 10:44 am. This was scheduled to be posted the Friday before Thanksgiving as the purpose of the post was to promote special holiday markets and festivals (that were happening on the 23rd & 24th) where consumers could buy locally produced items (wine, jam, cheese, eggnog, etc.) to make their holiday meal locally-sourced. Instead of posting a picture, I decided to link our interactive calendar that lists culinary and agricultural events in hopes that the post would generate a high click rate and promote traffic on the calendar page of our website. 🦃🌽🥕🥧🍷 |
Third Post:
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| The third piece of content was also posted on November 29, 2019 at 3:08 pm. Every year, MDAR puts together an event the day after Thanksgiving called Green Friday as a way to kick-off the holiday season but also to encourage people across the state to visit their local Christmas tree farms and nurseries to buy local Christmas trees, holiday plants and other holiday greenery. Instead of having two separate posts: a press release and photographs of the day, I decided to combine them into one very interactive post containing a photo link to the press release as well as a link to learn more about where to buy local Christmas trees. 🎄⛄🎅 |
Fourth Post:
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| The fourth piece of content was posted on December 6, 2019 at 8:48 am after the Massachusetts Farm Bureau Meeting in Framingham, MA. Our Commissioner wanted to post a picture of attendees at the conference and I shared with him my desire to post someone who had an interesting/emotional story. He chose Charles McNamara, whose father served as MDAR Commissioner for ten year between 1958 and 1968. We snap a picture of the two and shared the Commissioner's quote as part of the post. 📸👨 |
Fifth (and Final) Post:
 |
| The fifth piece of content was also posted on December 6, 2019 at 10:35 am. This post was not originally going to be a part of my campaign as it was not a very visually appeasing but then I realized that this post was about utility--it is important information we had to get out about an upcoming agricultural business program and I was curious to see how the post would do and whether or not it would get a lot of comments, likes or shares. 🏫🎒📚 |
Campaign Analysis:
As stated before, the goal of running a social media marketing campaign is to gather meaningful information about our customers/followers so that we can take action to better promote our brand, products and services.When analyzing our campaign, it is important for us to distinguish between factual data sources and estimated data
sources. While factual data sources include more reliable interactions like
commenting, sharing, liking, and click-through rates, estimated data sources
include views, impressions, and reach which are only an estimate of the number
of times a user has potentially seen a piece of content or advertisement. Often we can be fooled into thinking our posts are performing better than they actually are because we see a high number under the impressions or reach category. While this number is can be useful as an estimate, it is in the interactions that we see solid engagement numbers. When it comes to the engagement of these interactions, the best indicators for a successful post include the following: a share (the best), a comment (good), and a reaction/like (okay).
Facebook Insights:
Since Facebook provides its own insights including the reach and engagement of a post, I figured I would start here for my analysis.
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| I have starred the five posts for this campaign. As you can see these were the most successful posts during the time frame with the most successful post being the Green Friday post with a reach of 1.8k and an engagement rate of 133 post clicks and 54 reactions/comments/shares. |
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| Since my campaign began, the overall stats on our page has gone up and we have 31 new page likes. |
First Post:
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| This post received 14 likes, 1 share, 48 post clicks, and had an estimated reach of 321 people. |
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| This post received 12 likes, 3 loves, 3 comments, 7 shares, 22 post clicks, and had an estimated reach of 303 people. |
Third Post:
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| This post received 45 likes, 2 loves, 7 shares, 132 post clicks, and had an estimated reach of 1,765 people. |
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| This post received 30 likes, 3 loves, 1 share, 14 post clicks, and had an estimated reach of 372 people. |
Fifth Post:
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| This post received 12 likes, 6 shares, 20 post clicks, and had an estimated reach of 290 people. |
Google Trends:
Google Trends, a tool provided by Google,
looks to analyze the popularity of brands and search queries (in Google Search)
across regions. This website uses graphs and maps to compare results across different
time frames.  |
| Upon searching for the term Massachusetts Department of Agricultural Resources this is the chart that I received from Google Trends. As you can see, interest peaked before Thanksgiving and then again in the beginning of December. This could be a result of my campaign or just coincidence? I like to think that my campaign contributed to these peaks since the peaks correspond to times in which the posts in my campaign were posted. |
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| It makes sense that Massachusetts would rank first as the region with the most interest for this search since MDAR promotes Massachusetts items. The proximity to Massachusetts could explain why New York was also included. |
Social Bakers:
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| From the period between November 15, 2019 to December 14, 2019, all our Facebook posts received a combined total of 139 reactions (78.09%), 4 comments (2.25%) and 35 shares (19.66%). Considered all of these interactions are tangible measures of success I am quite pleased with this result (especially since we had so many shares). Please keep in mind that this chart does take into account posts that were not included in the campaign (posted by other staff). |
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| As we can see from this graph, the most interactions happened during our 5 campaign posts (11/22, 11/29, 12/6). |
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| This graphic indicates the level of engagement for each post type: carousel (multiple pictures in one post), link and photo. As the graphic shows, posts with multiple images have the highest levels of engagement with links coming in as second highest and a single photo coming in as least high. |
Campaign Evaluation & Conclusion:
In the end, I believe that my campaign was successful in boosting engagement on MDAR's Facebook page and building trust in its brand. While I was not able to exercise my full range of creativity (due to internal restrictions), I did find that over the course of two weeks, our engagement rates and estimate reach was higher. From November 21 to December 18 (time measured by Facebook in last 28 days) our estimated post reach went up to 3,672 (up 2.2 k from last month) our post engagement went up to 977 (up 660 from last month) and our page received 31 new likes (up 16 from last month).
In using three different analytic tools, I found the insights on Facebook and Social Bakers to be the most insightful. Social Bakers was user-friendly and provided a singular dashboard for multiple social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter). It also allowed the user to compare their progress with that of their competitors, which is a useful tool to have especially when you are trying to sell a service or a product (as a department we are trying to share information and promote Massachusetts agriculture as a whole). I tried to use Social Mention but for some reason it would never let me use the site so I tried a similar tool called Mentionlytics but in the end it did not yield useful results in terms of our Facebook account (it said there was not enough data). Google Trends was also helpful but I think that our brand is so small comparative to other larger names that it simply could not pull enough data to create a truly insightful analysis.
Overall, I have learned a lot from this course and I am excited to take what I have learned from the readings and from this campaign to continuing building the MDAR brand and promoting Massachusetts agriculture. I am hoping to also take this information to build another page I manage for the Massachusetts Dairy Promotion Board, as that is another brand I really would like to build.
Goncalves, A. (2017). Social media analytics strategy: using data to optimize business performance. New York: Apress.
McDonald, J. (2019). Social media marketing workbook: how to use social media for business. San José, CA: JM Internet Group.
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