Analytics

In the following video, I analyze data from the University of Florida’s College of Journalism and Communications’ Facebook account. This material displays my ability to manipulate data, create charts from the data and draw conclusions that support my suggestions for improvements to the social media strategy.

When deciding where to focus my analysis, I noticed that new pages likes saw a rise and fall between August and December, with the peak in October (80). I began to wonder what made the occurrence of new likes rise and fall. I wanted to look into it deeper to try to uncover a reason why that might be. I began my research by examining post frequency to see if it might have contributed to new page likes.

Although the highest numbers were published in October (26), it was not significantly higher than September (25) or November (23). This made me want to look into the reach of the content. The reach was high for the month overall – 18,883, which saw a 57% increase from September (11,999). The number then dropped 72% in November (5,333). I decided to investigate if the content posted received a higher reach because it created more stories, and was therefore more engaging.

The stories created from the content publish also saw a rise and fall from August to December, again with the peak in October. There were 220% more stories created in October (934) than in September (282). The number of stories created dropped 781% from October to November (106). Taking a deeper dive like this reveals that the key to new page likes doesn’t simply lay in post frequency. The specific content posted by UF CJC played a major role.

Looking at the monthly reach by post type showed me that links outperformed the photos (by 120%) and status updates (by 1030%) overall from August to December even though more photos were posted in September and October than links.

I took the top two performing posts (by reach) per month to see exactly what was posted. Of the ten I pulled, 80% were links.

After looking at all of the data, it is clear that links perform really well. There is a direct correlation between post frequency, content type, stories created and reach. In general with social media, photos tend to perform better than links. However, one of the most important social media best practices is to know your audience and how they consume content. Photos do perform well among the UF CJC audience. However, links perform better. Using October as a baseline, posting at least 26 times per month with the majority being relevant links and photos would boost the monthly stories created, and thus increases the reach. The higher the reach from relevant content, the higher the monthly likes will result.