Student Affairs Communications Group Minutes
February 12, 2014
Attendance: Aaron Schultz, Kent Sumner, Brianna McNall, Colleen Schlonga, Wendy
Little, Majeed Badizadegan, Jen Still, Nancy Raskauska, Jennifer Edwards,
Next meeting of the Student Affairs Communications Group will be Wednesday,
February 26, 2014, 9 a.m. -10:30 a.m., MU Council Room. Topic: The connection
between marketing and assessment with Daniel Newhart
Today
Majeed Badizadegan, New Media Coordinator for Department of RecSports and
Nancy Raskauskas, Online Marketing Specialist for University Housing and Dining
Services presented how they you analytics to improve results with web pages and
social media.
For web analytics, both use Google Analytics. The first area of Google Analytics the
showed was “Behavior Flow”. This shows how customers use your webpages;
letting you know which links they click on most. The data can be presented in two
ways, either as the number of clicks or in color patterns. They use this data to
organize how information is presented on their websites and page organization. It
allows them to place more sought after information in places that are easier for
customers to find. It also provides information of what might be best called out as
menu items and what pages might be eliminated due to lack of use.
The second area of Google Analytics they covered was “Acquisition” which shows
how customers find your website. “Direct Traffic” is customers that type in your
URL directly to find your site. Many times this traffic is driven by marketing
material and can be used to determine the effectiveness of marketing campaigns.
“Organic Search” are customers that find your website via a search engine. A third is
“Social Traffic” that comes from customers linking to your website from social
media sites.
Google Analytics can also provide “Demographics” in the areas for device used to
view your website (mobile, tablet or desktop/laptop), browser used (Chrome,
Safari, Firefox, Explorer) and if they are a new or returning visitor.
In the area of Social Media, both Majeed and Nancy use Facebook Insights. It
provides information on how many customers looked an individual posts, when
they looked at it (time of day) and their age group and sex. From this information
you can determine what is the best time of day to post to get the most views and
what kind of post get the most views. Majeed said that he feel it is not worth doing a
post unless it has a photo/image associated with it and a link to more information.
They warned about putting too much attention on the number of “likes” because
these numbers can be manipulated. There are “Like Farms” where people can buy
“likes”.
For other social media, tools that Nancy and Majeed use are “Hootsuite”,
“Tweetdeck” and “Social Listening”. Each provide different tools and information
but a similar. They allow you to schedule posts, track the number of views and
when a post has been forwarded. Using the hash tag (#) give you the ability to
group posts together and track what others are saying about the same subject.
In most social media tools, when you post, everyone that is following you sees the
post, except for Facebook. They have an algorithm that determines which of your
followers will see the post. So you are not sure who is seeing your posts in
Facebook.
Links:
Facebook fraud: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag
Twitter analytics: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkwqpynbkNQ