how to do editorial research: social media

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©2014 American Academy of Neurology

Social Media

How to do Editorial Research:

Morgan SorensonManaging Editor, Neurology: Neuroimmunology &

Neuroinflammation

[email protected]


• Started in 2009

• Over 67,000 facebook likes

• Over 29,000 Twitter followers

• Goal: Increase web traffic without taking a lot of staff time

Background


• Should we increase staff time?

• Should we focus on one type of social media more than another?

• Are the “likes” and “retweets” good indicators on how much traffic is being directed to our site?

Was there value in our efforts?

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• No budget

• Limited time

• No statistical expertise

• No clear idea of how much

importance to place on results

Barriers


• Use link shortening services to create trackable links (one

for Twitter, one for facebook)

• 6 papers on similar topics – some promoted, some not

• Survey authors to see if they provided their own

promotion

• Compare results of web traffic from Twitter and facebook

• Compare access numbers for the promoted/non promoted

articles

The study


Results

• Less than 1% of web traffic

was coming from our

social media

• Twitter had a higher click rate

• Authors were generally not doing their own social

media promotion

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Interpreting results

•Do you have enough data to

make an informed decision?

•Do you have the right kind of

data to answer the question?

• Is this conclusive?

•Results now might not be accurate in the

future


The future

• At the time, we determined

that we would not increase

time spent on social media

• Possibly trying to use more engaging

methods on Twitter

• Focus on other ways to drive traffic to

the website


Finding similar studies

•Others most likely needed the same data

•Published research is easily found and

accessible (CSE site, blogs, Google, etc)

•Great to get ideas from, but was important

to study our journal specifically

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Using free analytics: Twitter

• See your top

tweets

• See who your top

followers are

• Compare tweets

from days/months


What topics are getting the most attention?

Twitter has great


• Find what time is most

effective for your

audience

• Compare posts and look

at engagement with your

content

Insights: facebook

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Insights: facebook

• Compare against similar pages

• Compare posts and look at engagement

with your content


Other free resources


Future research

• Working on a Twitter project

• Repeat original study every few years

• Always keeping up to date with new

studies posted in the same topic area

how to do editorial research: social media

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