Who am I?
My name is Dr. Debra Zahay-Blatz and I am a Professor of Marketing at St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas and Director of the Master of Science in Digital Marketing and Analytics program. I have been teaching digital marketing and analytics for over twenty years and I am currently the author or co-author of several textbooks, one on social media. In this blog, I will share tips and techniques for teaching social media analytics.
“Experiencing, Learning, Reflecting” by mrsdkrebs is licensed with CC BY 2.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/
How should we teach Social Media Analytics?
To start, I would argue that the students must learn how to do social media analytics not from a textbook, but from doing the work of analytics. Our approach here at St. Edward’s University is that of experiential or action learning. There is a quote attributed to a Chinese philosopher that says “I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.” As this image illustrates, Julius Caesar and Albert Einstein, among others, have also supported the notion of experience as a great teacher.
It is this doing that we are currently exploring in MKTG 6432, our social media analytics class in the Master of Science program. As part of the class, we use a blog project. Students set up a blog in WordPress and then promote it over social media over a period of weeks, also tracking their results in Google Analytics. The blog is a great way for them to explore organic search as well as social media analytics. Students post on their blog in five separate weeks and then analyze the results of various techniques. Students test the effects of posting videos and pictures, sharing their own content, sharing original content via email and other techniques.
What kind of project?
The first secret then to a class in this area is to have a good application-based project. In this project the key is to have the students create a blog of interest to them in a narrow area (think “long-tail”) which they might be known. For graduate students, I recommend a topic tied to their personal professional brand. For undergraduates with less work experience it might be better to have them blog on a hobby or other area of interest. I have had undergraduate students blog about television shows, cooking, traveling, etc. Graduate students can blog on specific aspects of marketing or social media or digital marketing. Privacy concerns or the latest graphic tools are some ideas in that area. Students should carefully research the topic of their blog and come up with a relevant title before proceeding (Culbertson, 2021)
Students should choose the social media platforms most likely to be accessed by the target for their blog to promote their posts. For example, I use LinkedIn and Twitter to promote my professional blogs because that is where I have the most followers and connections in my target audiences. I primarily blog on how to teach digital marketing and I have a lot of connections on those two platforms.
Which blog platform?
We have used both Blogger and WordPress for this project. This semester we are using WordPress. If you have seen my prior blog post on linking Google Analytics to Blogger, the new GA4 means that students have to create both a GA4 ‘property’ and a UA ‘property’ in GA during initial setup. UA stands for Universal Analytics and was long the way that we linked blogs and other web pages to Google Analytics. To link Google Analytics to the blog in either platform students can then copy and paste the UA code from the UA property. The two will be linked immediately and students can test the link themselves. Students will be using the older platform and still linking their blog to analytics through the UA code. Neither Blogger nor WordPress at this writing seem seems to have fully integrated with GA4 for purposes of this project. However, the students will have a GA4 property set up for when that integration has progressed further.
Other than the ability to be able to report Google Analytics there is really no preferred blog platform for the project. After setup, students can then concentrate on finding and posting good content, promoting their blog and analyzing response. To summarize, this blog project allows students to plan, implement and measure the results of a digital marketing campaign, in this case a content-focused blog. This little ‘secret’ means that students can learn social media analytics first hand.
References
Culbertson, M. (January 11, 2021.) The Guide to Choosing a Blog Name You won’t Regret. Blog Clarity. https://blogclarity.com/the-guide-to-choosing-a-blog-name-you-wont-regret/#:~:text=To%20get%20to%20a%20blog%20name%20that%20you,a%20black%20ballpoint%20will%20do%29%2C%20and%20let%27s%20go.