Blog

Biggest trends of data visualization

geeconsystem — Wed, 01 Nov 2017 06:41:41 +0000

You will have data inside your business from existing customers, market research and sales figures. These may have geography attached to them in terms of postcodes, addresses or regions. If you capture market segment or demographics as well as sales, volumes and values, you will have a host of rich resources locked away and offering you a huge potential for discovery.

The discovery through data visualisation turns information into intelligence, numbers into meaningful assets and location into decision making tools.

1) Social First Data Visualizations
RJ Andrews from Info We Trust is hoping to see more data storytelling created with social media in mind first. “It’s almost like content stumbles onto social right now,” he explained, “it is something that has yet to be figured out in a compelling way, but the community is slowly becoming aware. Social can mean a lot of things – looping animations, GIFs, YouTube shorts – these are formats dataviz is slowly breaking into”.

2) Big Data Becomes Approachable
2016 was a huge year for big data, with more organizations collecting, processing, and analyzing data sets of all forms and sizes. We expect to see more systems that support large volumes of data in 2017, and even easier ways for end users to extract value from the numbers.

3) Push for Accuracy and Truth
One huge underlying theme we kept hearing from our experts in regards to data visualization this year was truth. Towards the end of 2016 data literacy went from nice-to-have to a must-have.
Consultant and speaker Bill Shander would like to see an increased focus on facts. “Being truthful and clear with data has always been at the core of the visualization field,” he said. “But this year, with the cacophony about ‘fake news’ and political speech (and references to statistics) being more hyperbolic and less factual than usual, the focus is increasing. There has recently been an endless stream of commentary on truth in data that I think will dominate the conversation for quite a while.”

4) Storytelling and Narrative Still Going Strong
Narrative is more important than ever. The term ‘storytelling’ is not a buzzword, it’s just gotten a bad reputation. Catherine Madden explains: “Storytelling and narrative are totally real, but I just think they have lost some meaning thanks to overuse. A word I’ve started to use a bit more is ‘packaging.’ I think that people are starting to realize that the data and subsequent visualizations can’t just speak for themselves, and you need to figure out how to wrap it up and what else to include for it to truly inspire action.”

The post Biggest trends of data visualization appeared first on .

Digital Dashboards for Social Media and its benefits

geeconsystem — Wed, 01 Nov 2017 05:39:27 +0000

Digital marketing dashboards for checking your website and social media come in all shapes and sizes. Here we share some of the best that we believe provide a cost effective and sometimes innovative insight into your online activity.

It is important to not use every feature in every dashboard but rather to create a set of questions that you need to answer and then look deep into the dashboard information to turn that data into intelligence that can better inform your decision making.

Digital Dashboards for Website Analytics

www.alexa.com
www.sitebeam.net
www.google.com/analytics
www.web.archive.org

Dashboard to Help Lead Generation

www.loopfuse.com

Indexing Your Social Influence

www.klout.com
www.mypeerindex.com

Monitoring Your Social Mentions

www.socialmention.com
www.eu.mention.net
www.mentionmapp.com

Twitter Dashboards

www.crowdbooster.com
www.twiangulate.com
www.twitterfall.com
www.schmap.it

Integrated Social Media Dashboards

www.metricpulse.com
www.idashboards.com
www.sproutsocial.com
www.marketmesuite.com
www.socialreport.com

The effective combination of some of these dashboards should provide the detailed digital analytics that you can use to turn the information into intelligence that will help you to continuously improve your digital marketing activity.

If this intelligence can inform you along the full length of your customer journey and sales and marketing conversion funnels you will be well placed to deliver great return on investment of resource for your organisation.

5 benefits of using a social media dashboard:
1. Productivity

Let’s be honest. How many times have you logged in on Facebook to schedule posts on your business page only to find yourself lost in the sea of posts after 30 minutes? And suddenly, you realise you haven’t retweeted something you were meaning to. You rush to Twitter and the same story repeats. A dashboard will save you ton of time. Because on its own, each social media platform can be a time-suck. With a dashboard, you are keeping things in perspective.

2. Tracking

You want to keep a tab on what your competitors are upto. Who’s talking about them? Who’s following them? How’s their engagement? All tracking-related questions that you can answer with simple search inside the tool.

3. Scheduling

Only a few social networks allow you to schedule your content. It’s a headache to go inside each account and schedule every post manually. Granted, networks like Twitter operate in “real-time” but you can’t be online all day long. Plus, no one likes being bombarded with string of posts within a given span of time, so scheduling is a smarter way to be present without really being there. A dashboard comes to rescue!

4. Analytics

You’ve probably wondered: What type of posts are a “hit” with my audience? Which ones get the most shares and engagement? How do I get more leads through social channels? Thankfully, with a dashboard, you can stop the guesswork. By seeing what your audience clicked on, you can fine-tune into what your followers enjoy. Dashboards make it easy to analyze everything at once.

5. Collaboration

Most dashboard tools will allow you and your team members to collaborate. You can also divide roles and duties and allocate social media tasks to each member so you know who’s accountable. Works like a charm especially when you’re remotely-based.

The post Digital Dashboards for Social Media and its benefits appeared first on .

Top ten tips for controlling your Social Media

geeconsystem — Wed, 01 Nov 2017 05:15:04 +0000

Top Ten Tips for Controlling your Social Media

1. Dedicate specific time each day and every day. This is part of your working life not an addition to it

2. Think about checking your social media when you check your emails as you are likely to be in the same frame of mind

3. Prioritise your networks so you focus appropriate time where your customers are and where they are most likely to respond

4. Get lots of little wins. Make sure you set lots of short term targets, each one contributing to your social media footprint

5. Watch outcomes of individual posts and tweets so you learn quickly what works and what to avoid next time

6. Follow, share and like to ensure you are digitally extrovert, engaged and ‘out there’

7. Balance talking and listening and to ensure you learn as much as you talk and market yourself – be current, relevant, informed

8. Share the workload, with a consistent output and style but some level of individuality. Teams win

9. Integrate printed, face to face and digital activity within the customers’ journeys. In their eyes, it’s all about them, not you

10. Make it mobile so you can social network wherever you are to save time and prevent yourself forgetting the great ideas and opportunities that pop up during the day – remember those “ice-cream moments” – capture it and share it before the ice-cream melts and the moment is gone!

The post Top ten tips for controlling your Social Media appeared first on .

What Should Marketers Think About Today?

geeconsystem — Wed, 01 Nov 2017 05:07:25 +0000

One of the most difficult things facing those who are responsible for digital marketing is the proving of Return on Investment (ROI).

It is relatively straightforward to show activity and outputs like number of followers and incremental awareness and profile following publishing of content. Many experienced marketers have now understood how to plot the customers’ journey from the initial point of awareness, through conversion to ongoing retention and the building of loyalty. However this is often high level vanity metrics where big numbers like ‘reach’, ‘likes’ and ‘shares’ over shadow the true value of the activity. For most businesses the true value comes from incremental customers or perhaps gaining incremental sales value from existing customers. The biggest challenge the marketer faces is truly and accurately joining up their digital activities and content publishing with actual measurable sales volume and value.

Digital dashboards like HubSpot, SocialReport, SproutSocial and the like are great for measuring the information about activity and helping the marketer to turn that into insights that support decision making going forward, but it typically tends to be ‘just’ marketing data. In the coming years the marketers who will rise to the surface and shape the future of the industry will be those who can provide accurate, timely and ongoing tangible evidence of the financial return their activity has achieved.

The post What Should Marketers Think About Today? appeared first on .