Social media managers traditionally rely on historical data to better analyze future success. Managers rely on historical data mostly because of the inability to get accurate and actionable data in real-time. What if social media managers could monitor the Facebook audience, how noisy their news feeds are, and how to best take advantage?
We’re thrilled to finally unveil a project we’ve been hard at work on: Pulse. Pulse evolves social media analytics from studying the past, to seeing how social is performing now—as it happens. Pulse monitors the following:
- Audience Online
- News Feed Noise
- Audience Online : News Feed Noise Forecasts
- Pod Activity
- Brand Name Mentions
- And more!
We’re leveraging a few key proprietary technologies to monitor activity across Facebook (USA), as it happens. With our technology, we’re able to identify total online activity while also benchmarking against historical averages to determine anomalies in user behavior. Paired with an effective Pod selection technique, brand managers now have the opportunity to assemble Pods that represent their fans’ competing pages in their news feed.
Audience Online
Audience Online shows general activity of all US Facebook users currently on, and using, Facebook. We gather this information through a proprietary technique utilizing Facebook’s API. We’ve been monitoring these activity levels for several months and have been able to establish a good baseline for activity. Use this metric to understand if more people are on Facebook than average.
News Feed Noise
Similar to Audience Online, we’re leveraging our proprietary technique of monitoring activity on Facebook. News Feed Noise refers to the activity of Facebook Pages instead of Facebook Users. Pages posting into the news feed creates “noise” for Facebook users. Understanding when noise is low and user activity is high offers the optimal conditions to publish into the news feed.
Pod Activity
Brands can take News Feed Noise one step further by specifically monitoring brands that make up your fans’ news feeds. Pages within Pods tend to post within certain time ranges, with Pod Activity monitoring you’ll be able to see when they’ve finished posting for the day. Knowing that their pages will most likely be silent gives your brand an opportunity to hop into the news feed.
Past / Now / Future
The top of Pulse provides three different perspectives for our users: Past, Now, and Future. Each perspective provides emphasis on different metrics that are more important for that particular time frame. For example, the Past analyzes the last 24 hours to help the user determine if anything was abnormal while the Future focuses on upcoming activity in the next 6 hours.
Past
The Past section analyzes the past 24 hours to help identify any abnormalities. Keep an eye out for unusual spikes in Audience Online or News Feed Noise. Actual posts from Pages within the Pod are displayed beneath the graph charting activity and noise. The dots are sized in relation to their engagement success.
Past focuses on three metrics: Yesterday’s Noise, Yesterday’s Audience Online, and Yesterday’s PostAcumen Score. Each metric compares yesterday’s performance against that day of the week’s historical average. For example, if Yesterday’s Noise (a Tuesday) was -3% this means that yesterday’s Page Activity Noise was 2% less than a typical Tuesday. This provides perspective to understand how noisy the news feed may have been. Days with extremely high Noise may be the result of a large event in the industry such as SXSW (for our industry).
Past Activity
Monitor activity over the past 24 hours as it relates to the Pages within your Pod. Mention activity (on the left) highlights mentions of the brands within your Pod. These mentions provide context of how active people online are discussing the brand. In the main graph of the page, the user is able to switch to a Page Mentions view to get a better understanding how people with a level of affinity with a particular brand are using Facebook.
Recent Posts are listed on the right side of the page. Sort by Lifetimes to see how long recent posts lived within the news feed. Posts such as these create noise within the news feed. Short Lifetimes means content is entering the news feed, creating noise for your fans, then exiting in the news feed in a timely manner. Long Lifetimes (+4 hours) indicates that their posts are spending a lot of time in the news feed. If you’re dealing with Long Lifetimes, it’s best to avoid posting within these timeframes.
Now
Post Now?
Post Now provides context into understanding how the next few hours will be performing as it relates to Noise, Audience, Pod, and Mentions. For most brands, target low noise, high audience online, low Pod activity, and high mentions. Depending on a brand’s market position and social strategy, the column to focus on will differ.
For dominant brands, posting during high noise, high audience, high Pod activity, and high mentions may prove more beneficial. Dominant brands have the opportunity to actually crowd out their competition from the news feed. If Apple had a Facebook presence, this would be an excellent example of a company that would have this luxury.
Activity
On the left is a feature you’ve seen before, Page Mentions. Here you can keep track of activity and mentions for brands as it happens to keep perspective on the current hour. Page Mentions within the Now focus keeps the perspective shorter to within an hour.
Alive Posts provides incredible perspective that looks at posts that are currently “alive” within the news feed. These posts are directly contributing to news feed noise for your brand. We’ve provided an estimation of when we expect these particular posts to die. When these posts die, the news feed will be less noisy.
Future
Future Activity
This next section lets you examine what will happen in the next few hours based on historical data. In the example above, Pulse is expecting both Noise and Audience to decrease significantly over the next six hours. We’ve also forecasted that Pages within this Pod will most likely not be posting within the next six hours.
This can be advantageous to get an understanding if/when the Pod will be publishing soon. For crafty brands, this will serve as information to target low news feed competition. If your Pod was selected carefully, this could illustrate direct news feed competition for your fans or target demographic.
How To Best Use
We believe that this tool is best used when examining upcoming opportunities, specifically when looking to post. We’re providing a wide variety of signals to best understand the dynamism of the news feed. For some brands, we expect them to use Pulse to identify when fans are online. For others, we expect them to find sweet spots between high Audience Online and low Noise (recommended).
We view Pulse as the first iteration of a new perspective of Facebook analytics. We want to analyze the news feed in depth, as it happens to gain the most valuable insights. We’ve built Pulse to do just that. Let us know what you think about Pulse on Twitter, Facebook, or in the comments below!
