Social Media Analysis v. Business Analysis
Analyzing Social Media is not like Business Analysis. While both are used for business insights, their structure, analytics and data organization is different.
First and foremost, business analysis is very structured while social media analysis is semi-structured, meaning that data is stored in third party databases that can take many different forms. Social media analytics is not machine-readable, unlike conventional business analyses that are usually stored spreadsheets that can be machine-readable. (Khan 2018)
Values are not as important to business analytics as they are to social media analytics. The higher amount of shares equate to a higher value. Business data is more confined and seeks limited sharing to prevent competition. (Khan 2018)
Typically speaking, business analysis is formal, social media analysis is not.
Analysis: Paws4Survival Facebook Post
In an article titled “Social Media Analytics” from techopedia, the author says,
“Social media is a good medium to understand real-time consumer choices, intentions and sentiments. The most prevalent application of social media analytics is to get to know the customer base on a more emotional level to help better target customer service and marketing.”
(Techopedia 2017)
This quote is significant as it defines the importance of humanizing the customers and using social media analytics to understand the emotional connection to a brand.
To conduct a social media analysis, I visited the Facebook page for Paws4Survival Rescue Inc., an animal rescue and adoption service that mainly rescues dogs and cats off the streets of Puerto Rico.
I chose a post from August 28th that shows images of dogs and displays text implying that these dogs have been bathed and are about to travel North.
Time Posted: Friday, August 28th, 2020 at 8:24 p.m.
Type of Post: Collage of 6 Images with Text and 9 Hashtags
Interactions: 76 reactions, 5 comments and 5 shares
*As of August 30th, 2020 at 4:10 p.m.
Comparisons to Other Posts
- Compared to recent Paws4Survival image posted in the morning, this post received more shares.
- Recent image posts of “adoptable” animals have received the most shares, recent adoptable animal photos with biographical texts received 8-12 more shares than this unclassified post.
- The next image collage posted a little over 2 and a half hours after this post earned 13 more interactions and 7 more comments but had 4 less shares.
- Compared to the next most recent dog image collage post (of 4 or more images) and the most recent cat image collage post (of 4 or more images), both dog collage posts received significantly more interactions than the most recent cat collage post. The second most recent dog collage post received 64 interactions and the most recent cat collage post received 12 interactions.
Conclusions
Paws4Survival picked a good time to publish this post as images posted in the evening/night seem to reach a higher amount of people in terms of shares. Two recent similar image collage posts posted on August 29th at 2:25 p.m. received only 1 share and another posted on August 27th at 11:54 a.m. received no shares.
Recently, on the Paws4Survival Facebook Page, collages with dogs have been more popular than collages with cats. Posting this collage featuring dogs was smart social media marketing, as the hashtags #nationaldogday and #internationaldogday were used recently on the page and users may be influenced by the celebration of dogs.
While all recent posts were based around single images or collages (with the exception of one video posted), the collages posted received more significantly more interactions than the single images, but less shares.
Overall, this seemed to be a well-thought out and strategic post for this page.
References
Khan, G. F. (2018). Chapter 3: Understanding Social Media Analytics. In Creating value with social media analytics: Managing, aligning, and mining social media text, networks, actions, location, apps, hyperlinks, multimedia, & search engines data (pp.60). Seattle, WA: CreateSpace.
Techopedia. (2017, April 26). What are Social Media Analytics (SMA)? – Definition from Techopedia. Retrieved August 30, 2020, from https://www.techopedia.com/definition/13853/social-media-analytics-sma
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