On January 19th, Gordon Brown visited the Weboptimiser office. We posted about it, we did not use all our channels, we just posted a bit here and there. Now we are able to look back and see what happened in some detail – see the chart below. We were able to examine 80% of UK online posts relating to the UK political parties, on the day and surrounding days.
Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Weboptimiser posts compared
As you can see from the attached chart Gordon Brown is leading in online coverage, yet the gap between the two leaders is small, so small that small activities can make the difference.
Whilst the charts show a leading a position for Gordon Brown, the position is not strongly ahead. When we compare our activity we can see that our posts on the day that Gordon Brown visited ensured that Gordon Brown stayed ahead that day, as otherwise it is possible that his leadership online would have fallen behind.
People who post are predisposed to making their voice heard online. The data is a good sample due to size, with no relationship to age, ability or employment. The key is that these people are active with varying degrees of influence. We can easily identify those who have more or less influence as we can see how often each person posts, how many times their posts are read and how many people follow.
Whenever we provide this kind of data there are always a lot of questions that need to be answered in order to understand the efficacy of the underlying data. For instance we are not considering sentiment or value. i.e. whether or not overall opinions are negative or positive and the importance (readership influence) of the people who are posting. i.e. someone complaining may have little reach. A reporter from The FT, or The Sun or other publication may well have a completely different ability to influence.
There are three key considerations:
1) what are the questions we could investigate
2) how could we rate sentiment
3) to ensure that what we learn is useful
There is one further question to be asked and this is what is the party doing that could ensure that it has more influence online.
From this we can see a number of potential Social Media campaign steps. The first starts with the process of social media monitoring, the second with individual training and development, the third with strategic planning, fourth implementation of communication program and last, to complete the loop, back to monitoring and analysis.
The Social Media top tip here is that social media monitoring is at the heart of Social Media Campaign planning. We would appreciate your thoughts comments. Please feedback on this post…
