Reporting on the Blog Project

I have been providing details of the blog project in my social media analytics course and wanted to show what the students report each week regarding their blog posts that they promote on social media.  There are many ways to set up this spreadsheet and this is one way.  Many thanks to Dr. Leila Samii at Southern New Hampshire University and Dr. Holly Syrdal at Texas State University for their inspiration on this project. In this class, we have the students create five blog posts and post them on Monday. On Sunday night they report the week’s activity on a spreadsheet.

The First Tab: Overall Results and Future Goals

This spreadsheet has been anonymized so the student and the blog cannot be identified. On the first tab students answer a series of questions each week about the date they posted, the time frame they are analyzing and the effect of this week’s activity.  For example, this week students are encouraged to to write a post optimized to be put on social media. While students always promote on social media, in some weeks they might be encouraged to write an email or do something else to analyze the effect of traffic on the blog. Students must analyze where traffic is coming from and goals for the coming week.  Most important, students must include a permanent link to that week’s blog post, known as a permalink.  This helps the instructor go to the correct blog link for evaluation purposes.  Students also submit this permalink in another assignment on Canvas where they are graded on best blogging practices as discussed in the HubSpot Content Marketing certification and other class materials.  The first student tab looks like this Figure below.

First tab showing the date of the post, the timeframe analyzed, results, future goals and permalink

The Second Tab: Analytics Detailed

The next spreadsheet tab is an overview of the Google Analytics and the two social media networks selected for the project. As we are focusing on a blog to emphasize the students’ personal professional brand, we now require LinkedIn to be one of the networks.  In this example, the student chose Twitter and Facebook.  Students also report on the Google Analytics (GA) for their blog using the UA property as discussed in a prior blog post.  Students must pick at least five metrics for each network and GA.  This student also showed the additional tools such as Hootsuite and TweetDeck and the native analytics available in Facebook that were used for analysis.

Second Tab Showing Google Analytics, Facebook, Twitter Metrics for Two Weeks of Blogging

The Final Tabs: Details of Posting

Third Tab Showing Weekly Twitter Analytics for Blog Post Promotion

The final tabs of the spreadsheet show the details of each week’s social media postings to promote the blog readership.  In this example, the student has made a number of Twitter posts and can see how the results varied by time of day and type of posts.  Typically, students will report their results in a discussion post and other students can provide ideas as to how to improve engagement and reach on particular social media platforms.  Students also comment on how to improve their blog posts and those of fellow students’ blogs by improving headlines, storytelling and other effective blog practices.

The discussion format means that everyone can share in developing their knowledge of metrics and of effective blogging.  Students put it all together in a final reflection paper for the project. They say what worked well and what they would have done differently.  Five blog posts in seven weeks of class including blog setup is not a lot of time so we can’t evaluate the students on gaining a large audience and lots of engagement in such a short period.  We can get them thinking about social media analytics and what they mean and how to best use them for their professional brand and in the workplace.

The Results

As I said in my first blog post on this project (Zahay, 2021), the idea is to give experience in social media analytics by have students, plan, implement and measure a social media campaign to promote their blog.  It has been a successful project so far in our classes and, after initial concerns, popular with the students. One of the most interesting things about this project is how much can be gained from simply reporting in an excel spreadsheet.  I asked the students if they wanted to keep the spreadsheet in the assignment and they said yes.  They liked the discipline of reporting each week and being able to see things in black and white to make adjustments to their weekly goals and tactics.

If you are just coming upon this blog post and want to learn how to get started with this project, check out the first post in this blog on teaching social media analytics below (Zahay, 2021). Please contact me with any questions or for additional resources.

References

Zahay, D. (2021, January 8). One Secret to Teaching Social Media Analytics (A Blog Project). Retrieved from https://zahayteachesdigital.blogspot.com/2018/09/secrets-to-teaching-google-analytics.html