WEEK 3: A Conversation with Guest Speaker Ruben Ochoa by Andy Pei
By UCLA X469.21 Student Andy Pei
Andy Pei
The world of social media marketing can be intimidating, with multiple platforms to manage an array of metrics, and a growing number of influencers who command big money for their endorsements. This is the world that our Week 3 speaker, Ruben Ochoa, lives in as the Director of Digital at Allison+Partners. But as he showed us, there are many tools available to make sense of it all, if we just know where to look.
Ruben Ochoa
All the most popular social media platforms have their own built-in native analytics. As depicted in the Social Media Analytics Compass, you can get data on campaign elements such as reach, engagement, and content. But Ruben pointed out that not all of the data is equally important. For example, he views audience size as more of a vanity metric, while engagement is more important than reach. When it comes to native analytics, some platforms provide better metrics than others; YouTube provides more specific video measurements than Facebook, while Twitter surprisingly gives the most data about your audience due to its data partnerships that other platforms just don’t have.
Ruben also gave us a list of his favorite monitoring tools such as Radian6, SEMrush and Google Analytics, which he describes as one of the most important yet perhaps the most daunting. With Google Analytics you can see how your social media content is driving people to your website for leads and conversions. It is also one of the most difficult analytic tools to learn — something I know from personal experience as someone who has gone through those growing pains. But according to Ruben, there are many online videos (and other resources) available to teach you these tools so you can master them and even put them on your resume… or not.
Other tools he showed us include those that help create better photos and find the influencers who will resonate most with your audience. While the list is long, it’s good to know such tools are out there for just about any need a digital communicator may have. And hopefully, it makes the world of social media marketing just a little less intimidating.
