Week 4: A Conversation with Guest Speaker Joel Paramo by Jenny Zhang

By UCLA X469.21 Student Jenny Zhang

Jenny Zhang

It was a great opportunity to hear from Joel Paramo as a guest speaker in our social media class. Joel is an account executive at Porter Novelli, a world-wide PR firm with an office here in Los Angeles. He shared lots of useful tips for measuring and optimizing social media campaigns via a variety of digital tools.

Here are some highlights:

Monitoring and Management:

Which digital tools you use for monitoring depends on the client’s needs and budget.

Joel Paramo

Hootsuite is a free tool (with paid upgrade option), so it works well if you are on limited budget. You can use it for listening, scheduling and analytics. It’s based on creating dashboards to track competitor feeds, keywords, comments, etc. on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. You can write and schedule posts using the same edit functions that you find on each platform. For example, you can attach images, add location and select privacy options – all within Hootsuite.  One thing you cannot do is paid ads.

Sysomos is a social media analytics tool that is relatively expensive. It enables you to track social media performance and analyze the value of your campaign results. Of course, when it comes to analytics you need to identify KPIs before you collect and analyze your data. Sysomos has buzz graph and word cloud features to show which terms users frequently use and how each word is connected. By analyzing these charts, you can improve your social media copy, as well as SEO.

Affinio is an analytics platform that identifies social media trends and analyzes real-time conversations. It can also help you find influencers who are relevant to your brand/campaign by topic, keyword, location, interest, etc.  Such information can be presented to clients to persuade them to invest further in the social media effort.

Content Creation:

There are hundreds of paid and free tools available. You can combine various tools depending on your client’s needs.

Engagement:

Sharpr allows you to see all the content you create and categorize it based on your needs. You can also repurpose content you curate into email newsletters, etc. The platform allows you to track data and get insights such as open and click-through rates.

Measurement and Reporting:

There are also plenty of measurement and reporting tools available. One that Joel discussed is Iconosquare, which helps you track Instagram campaigns. On Iconosquare, you can get data like impressions and reach, clicks to website, statistics on posts/stories and basic information about followers. As always, the key is to first set up your KPIs and figure out what data you want to track.

Bit.ly is a free tool that not only creates shortened and customized URLs, but also tracks individual link analytics and measures real-time campaign performance across channels. In addition, you can check your competitor’s Bit.ly links to see how they perform.

The key to success for digital marketers is to always be learning. With so many new tools coming up, we have to keep learning independently and from others in order to stay current.