Week 4: A Conversation with Guest Speaker Joel Paramo by Annabelle Iwuchukwu
By UCLA X469.21 Student Annabelle Iwuchukwu
Annabelle Iwuchukwu
Our week 4 guest speaker to discuss social media tools was Joel Paramo, an account executive at Porter Novelli. Joel has worked with a lot of well-known brands including California Almonds, which we focused on in class as he discussed tools for social media measurement and optimization. Below is a breakdown of the main points Joel covered. Each is important for anyone charged with running a brand’s social media campaign.
Monitoring
Joel covered tools such as Hootsuite that give great results and allow you to manage many social media accounts in one place.
Joel Paramo
Another (more costly) tool is Sysomos, which helps you discover, publish, engage and analyze social media very efficiently. It’s great for showing the value of a campaign and seeing where you’ve had a major change in followers or engagement. It also breaks down the information into demographics.
Lastly, Affinio (which is even more pricey) goes beyond the confines of traditional social media analytics to tell you in real time who is talking about your brand and where those discussions are taking place. It also focuses on the use of bio keywords (e.g. hashtags).
Content Creation
Turning to content creation, the best tool depends on your needs and budget. Popular tools Joel discussed include Adobe Suite and iMovie. Note that using a mixture of paid and free tools can help provide the best content quality at an efficient cost.
Engagement
Joel explained the importance of tracking your engagement by using tools such as Sharpr, which is a networking app that enables you to watch trends, curate content and connect with like-minded people. Another tool is Iconosquare, which works best with Instagram accounts. It allows you to plan and schedule your content, as well as perform analytics.
Measurement
Joel discussed measurement in relation to KPIs (key performance indicators), which are very important to track. KPI’s need to be customized based on the brand and its objectives. The main social KPI’s to track include:
- Total followers
- Published posts per month
- Total post likes per month
- Total post comments per month
- Total video views per month
- Total story views per month (Instagram and/or Facebook)
Finally, Joel talked about URL shorteners, which can be useful when you want people to click on a website link. Bit.ly creates a shortened link for any lengthy URL. It also allows you to monitor analytics for the link including the number of clicks over a specific period of time.
Thank you, Joel Paramo, for all the insights. I learned a lot.
