The Social Media Puzzle: Piece #5 Is there evidence that social media is worth all this time?

There has been a constant drum beat in the media over the past few years of Luddite criticism of social media. They claim that it is all a waste of time, that social media is banal and trivial.

For those of us who value technology there has to be more than blind faith to counter such views. Fortunately, a recent scientific study has shown that social media is linked to increased intelligence.

The study, by a team at Trinity College, Dublin, replicated the evolution of social interaction over 50,000 generations. It claims to have found a link between sociability and intelligence.

Professor Andrew Jackson and research student Luke McNally conducted the research. They used neural networks and games to simulate how humans interact in society and learn.

The findings will be published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the biological sciences journal of the Royal Society in London.

My personal view is that social media forces cooperation and openness. To do otherwise on social media would lead to being flamed as a troll. Cooperation and openness lead to increased learning, as your reading of this article illustrates, which will inevitably leads to increased intelligence.

Whether I can claim that reading this blog leads directly to increased intelligence is probably a step too far though! I don't think every Tweet or post is symbol of progress, but there are enough positive ones, I believe, to make it obvious that social media is of benefit to humanity overall.

To support this site - over 60 free posts so far on social media for you to explore - please buy one of my novels, The Istanbul Puzzle or The Jerusalem Puzzle or my guide to social media. And enjoy!

Interactivity on social media

Getting people to engage with you, to contribute to your blog or your Facebook page is an important element in getting social media right. Why? Because people are more likely to remember you and come back if they engage.

But how can you get people to engage?

1. Ask for participation often. Let people comment anonymously and by using their social media identities if they prefer.

2. Make engagement the centerpiece of the post or for a period on your site. Ask people to post their own links and to talk about what they do. Sure, you will get some people putting up advertising, but if the links are too much you can always simply delete the ones that breach your guidelines.

3. Ask people to post images. You can run a contest for the best photo of your product in a strange situation for instance.

4. Ask for text contributions or submissions of some type to win a review or some other real prize.

5. Build community in from the start. Facebook group are a perfect example of that. Start a group. People know what's expected on LinkedIn and Facebook groups and on other sites with groups or tribes.

6. Make your post about a burning issue. Take a stand and ask for contributions. Make it about something important and up to the minute and make your contribution genuine and open.

7. Be persistent. Don't give up if it's difficult at the start. Give it a reasonable amount of time, but don't forget to move on too, if you need to. Social media is about balancing experimentation with persistence.

In the spirit of this post, please make your own suggestions below as to how to improve interactivity and post a link to your own site so we can see what you do and visit you.

To support this site - over 60 free posts so far on social media for you to explore - please buy one of my novels, The Istanbul Puzzle or The Jerusalem Puzzle or my guide to social media. And enjoy!

The Social Media Puzzle: Piece #4 What do you measure in social media?

 Here are 12 suggestions for what to measure in social media:

1. Sentiment analysis – how many negative comments and positive comments are there about you or your service - in actual and percentage terms.

2. Tone – on a 3 or 5 or 7 point scale of how positive/negative, enthusiastic/couldn't care/disgusted posts are.

3. Influencers – the numbers of high "follower ratio" followers you have & their engagement levels with you.

4. Demographics – traditional measures of geographic, age, sex, status, interests of your followers.

5. Sub communities – number and types of sub communities spawning around your main social media presence. If you make cakes these could be chocolate cake lovers, gluten free users etc. 

6. Base statistics on follower numbers, unfollower numbers, retweetes, messages, posts for each platform including smaller/up and coming platforms such as Pinterst/Flickr, Forums, LinkedIn, YouTube blogs, etc, depending on which you focus on.

7. New markets, new trends, new topics emerging from conversations with customers and prospective customers.

8. Competitor activity, sentiment & other key metrics for your competitors.

9. Theme clouds – what are they key topics, popular words and phrases that are bubbling up and falling away among key communities.

10. Keyword tracking – do you have key words? How are they doing? Raw numbers and patterns of change.

11. Internal benchmarking – How are divisions/branches doing compared to each other on key metrics? How are things changing over time? 

12. External benchmarking - How do your stats compare with peers, competitors?

To support this site - over 60 free posts so far on social media for you to explore - please buy one of my novels, The Istanbul Puzzle or The Jerusalem Puzzle or my guide to social media. And enjoy!