August 7, 2018

6.5 : Using spreadsheets to analyse and populate reports

6.5 : Using spreadsheets to analyse and populate reports

Dr. Gordon Fletcher, Senior Lecturer, Salford Business School, UK

For the example here, we’ll use Sprout Social, as Sprout Social is a tool which enables you to aggregate together the information that you’ve received from your various social media networks. By doing this, you’re able to import all that data into a conventional spreadsheet package and use all the tools that conventional spreadsheet packages provide, exactly what you need.

There are a number of tools that allow you to link up your multiple data sources from both social media and your website and which can be further analysed on a spreadsheet.

 

Use spreadsheets to document and monitor trends and engagement levels with your buyer persona

With the comparison of different social media networks, and the peaks and troughs of activity, you can also begin to recognize that different social media networks provoke different responses in your buyer persona depending on what type of activities you’re doing.

If you’re producing an event, it may well be that there is a spike in activity just before on Facebook but then just after on Twitter. If you’re producing some activity that is alive tweeting event, it may well be that there’s an upward swing of activity on Twitter but an actual decline in Facebook.

Being able to recognize these patterns and trends is an important part of using social media network data, and by being able to recognize those patterns and trends and being able to compare different events that’ve occurred over time, it’s also possible to improve, to modify your activity, and gain greater benefit from those activities in to relation to your buyer persona.

Colin Telford, Managing Partner, The Candidate Ltd, UK

Spreadsheets for us are very important. They are the centre of the world within The Candidate, and everything we do revolves around spreadsheets – from business planning to marketing activity, to producing budgets, to setting out business plans, salaries, and looking at response rates and ROI. Everything does revolve around spreadsheets and it’s been a real key to me and my career in digital marketing and now digital marketing recruitment. The more that you can understand the power of spreadsheets, the better your business and your marketing strategies will be.

Spreadsheets are used extensively by The Candidate Ltd to combine multiple data sources and to make decisions

Alex Charalambidis, Digital Marketing Strategist, MONKS, Greece

We are usually using usually Excel or spreadsheets with different pages for different channels and actually, we have something like a calendar so the client can see the performance month by month.

The engagement calendar is a useful reporting mechanism to feedback to the campaign clients on a monthly basis.

Additional materials

Excel Guide for Search and Social Reporting

http://searchengineland.com/a-search-marketers-guide-to-becoming-an-excel-power-user-199906

For the more advanced learners amongst you…

For the more advanced users, here is a good use of Spreadsheets for Keyword research by SEO Gadget and many more:

https://moz.com/blog/excel-and-google-docs-tools-for-the-ultimate-seo-dashboard

http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/analyze-social-media-with-excel/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxZx9ocNYu0

References

Spreadsheets for data analysis and reporting

 https://www.optimizesmart.com/how-…

Analyze social media with excel

 http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com…

Spreadsheets for social media reporting

 http://mashable.com/2012/02/09/soc…

For chapter 6 relations sections, follow:

6.0 The importance of ongoing monitoring and learning from your engagement
6.1 Understanding of Social Capital and its importance case study
6.2 Accessing data in Google Analytics
6.3 Accessing data from Facebook
6.4 Accessing data from Twitter
6.6 Learning from digital results
6.7 PPC report