Social Media Analytics: A Practical Guidebook
Originally published on July 23, 2019.
Figuring out which parts of your social media strategy work, and which ones don’t, isn’t easy. Analyzing your activities and their effects can answer these questions for you, but getting started can be daunting: this new Social Media Analytics Guidebook, which I have written together with colleagues at Deutsche Welle Akademie, is trying to make social media analysis a lot easier.
The guidebook is aimed at people who are not social media analytics experts, but who want to gain a solid understanding of the basic metrics, what they mean, where to find them on common platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube and how to use social media analytics to inform and improve your activities.
The guidebook is primarily written for medium and small media houses as well as journalists with a limited or no budget, but will also be helpful for communications staff at humanitarian organizations and NGOs. The research for the document focused on users in African countries and involved telephone interviews with radio stations in multiple countries, as well as a trip to Uganda, during which I visited both rural and urban radio stations. You may notice that Instagram is not covered in the guide. This was a conscious decision because Instagram doesn’t play a big role for the radio stations that we talked to. On the other hand, we did include a short section on WhatsApp because this is a platform they really cared about.
The guidebook comes with a short workbook and templates, all of which you can download on the Deutsche Welle Akademie website.
