BONUS topic! Try analyzing something different!

 By Kirk Harrington, SAEG Partner

As some of you know, I created and help run an online campaign which seeks to raise awareness of my favorite band, and to promote their induction to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio
(where I currently reside).  As part of this effort, we have sites dedicated to fans on Facebook, Blogger, Twitter, Youtube, and Myspace.  We've been around for about 2 years now and one thing we struggled with was the flow of new fans onto our Facebook page and their interest and 'engagement' in our posts.  Further, this is the page I see as our highest visibility point to drive fans to our other sites and especially to our petition (to see that petition, you can go to www.ddttrh.info and click 'Sign Petition').

To help mediate the struggles, I decided to perform analysis on this space, with particular attention to our posts.  The nice thing about being a statistical analyst is that you can take almost any topic that you can think about and if you have a decent knowledge of it, can run useful analysis to drive successful results.  My pattern was simple...

Decide the purpose of the analysis-->Determine available data-->Determine the best approach to analyze the data-->Prepare and clean the data-->Perform analysis, interpretation, and provide results in a geared-to-my-audience format.

In regard to providing results in geared-to-my-audience format, I had to have my end audience in mind.  I work with an amazing group of people who are dedicated to DDTTRH, yet their backgrounds differ.  One is an IT person, another an artist (our publicist), and another I see with skills in project management.  When I wrote up my analysis, I had to think of them and the best way to show them the kind of results that could lead to actionable items to improve the engagement of our fans.

Another exciting part of this analysis was determining the kind of data (and any limitations) that Facebook has to analyze posts.  One limitation is that I could not go beyond a year, for example (I was hoping to go back to inception).  Also, there were certain assumptions I had to make based on the kind of data that was available and how far it would go to explain a person's behavior.  For example, I had to consider a 'like' or 'comment' as an engagement, though it could be argued that someone could read a posted article and not like or comment at all.

Also, I was hoping to do a linear regression, but because of the data limitation I decided to do just a regular trends analysis and present results in a meaningful way that would give us a guide or shooting a little closer to target.  And this is something I share with people I do analysis for.  Sometimes analysis (particularly for marketing) does not have to be perfect and extremely refined the first time out.  If you think of a dart board, sometimes you could be shooting off the board and scoring no points and a fair initial analysis could get you at least on the board closer to target.  Then, as you start to understand the data, its limitations, etc, you can find additional data sources to 'light your way' and can schedule to hold necessary data for more refined analysis next time.

As part of the analysis as well, I did an experiment where I posted something that I guessed (based on my analysis) would generate engagement, and I'm happy to say that my experiment was a success.

"If you think of a dart board, sometimes you could be shooting off the board and scoring no points and a fair initial analysis could get you at least on the board closer to target."

So, the end result once I compiled all my results was to share the results with my staff and to discuss any follow-up actions.  So far, the results have been good.  Not only were we able to discover what kind of posts would spark engagement of our fans, but also, because I added a time dimension, we were able to discover peak times where fans could be most engaged.  I have seen noticeable improvements in the quality of our posts and in additional fan traffic because of using this analysis to our benefit.

If you would like to see this analysis, please email me at enduranalyst@yahoo.com and I can Google Docs it to you.

I for one really enjoyed doing it.  Analyzing something different opened up a perspective and adventure that I would not normally have found if I didn't try it.  So get out there analysts!  Analyze something you enjoy and take an adventure...you will find it healthy and meaningful, I promise!

Kirk