Haven’t caught up on the other Domo Blogs? Catch Blog one and two here.
In my latest blog post, How to Automate Your Social Media Reporting Part I, I explained the significance and development of the of the Social Data Cube visualization in transforming and combining your social media data to surface crucial insights. Building on Part I, this blog content will serve as the final installment in this two part series, in which I will walk through creating the Social Data Cube and evaluating how it can be used to answer your social media reporting questions.
Step 1: What are you trying to measure?
This card is simple, yet very versatile in that it can be used to surface posts with the highest total engagement, reach, shares, link clicks, and any other metric included in our dataset. Begin by deciding which social network you want to base this card on and the metrics you want to measure. For this example, we will capture Facebook posts and use total engagements as a metric to sort top posts.
Step 2: Go Beast Mode
Create a new card using the data set we put together in Part I of this series and use the Table chart. We will want this visualization to provide more than just basic metrics on total likes and retweets, so start by creating all of the following Beast Modes.
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Step 3: Start building!
Starting from left to right, place each of the following categories and values into the columns section of your card.
- Date
- Post
- Post Copy
- Paid/Organic
- Total Engagements
- Engagement Rate
As a note, you do not need to follow my directions exactly as stated- your data and your dashboard should reflect your business question. At this point, your card should look somewhat similar to this:
Step 4: Make it user friendly!
Now for aesthetics…my favorite! The following instructions are solely based on my own personal preference. However you choose to integrate this step, focus on organizing the data in a way that best communicates the answer to your business question.
In this case, I am creating a card that will show me the posts that received the most engagements for the month, so I am going to make the ‘Total Engagements’ column easy to find.
Go to Chart Properties> General and click ‘Allow text to wrap.’
Next, click ‘Alignment.’ This menu allows you to align the content of each column to the left, right, or center. As a personal preference, I like to center the header, align the ‘Post Copy’ to the left, center ‘Paid/Organic’, and center all columns containing numbers. Again, there is no correct or incorrect way to align, so if you prefer to left justify ‘Total Engagements,’ center ‘Post Copy,’ or submit to total anarchy, go right ahead and do whatever feels most comfortable to you.
In the last step, select ‘Attribute’ in ‘Chart Properties.’ Bold the header row and ‘Post Copy’ text, as well as the metric you will be sorting by. In this case, I will be sorting by ‘Total Engagements.’
Step 5: Refine your data window.
All this data is great, but it will do you no good if it is not filtered correctly. At this juncture, we want to use ‘Filters’ to include only the Social Network we want in this card – Facebook. Then grab ‘Total Engagements’ from your collection of values and drag it to ‘Sorting’ to sort by descending order.
You will also want to hone in on a specific time frame. For this example, I want to see the all the posts that occurred within the last 30 days. This date range works for me and my business question, but you might find that you want to see only posts that occurred within the last 7 days or all the posts that occurred during the quarter. This all depends on your social media activity and the specific question you are trying to answer.
Step 6: Name it!
Now you can name your card. I would name it something descriptive like “Top Performing Facebook Posts.”
Bonus Step: Campaign Filters
Now that you have your social media reporting nice and automated, you can add another Beast Mode to only surface specific campaign related or promotional posts by filtering for specific hashtags or copy.
That’s a wrap! As you can tell, this visualization is extremely versatile and I encourage you to make it your own. Please share how you used the Social Data Cube in the comments section below. If you are interested in learning more about how Domo, reach out to us at questions@reddoor.biz and speak to one of our Domo Certified analysts about how we can bring your data to life.