aaronjreid

How many likes? How many views? How many shares? Everything we do on social media is measured by stats and analytics. As Facebook has grown over the years, the company has made a number of changes to provide analysis and measurement of our efforts on social media. Facebook has completely overhauled the group feature to include a new tab called Insights. It’s quite an overhaul from when they first started.

It’s basically Google Analytics on steroids. They analyze so many statistics to provide the user with in-depth metrics to discover what worked, when it worked, how it worked and when it worked. Page views, post reach, page likes, engagement and you can change the filtering criteria to analyze a specific range of dates to really measure the effectiveness of a media campaign. Everything someone would need to really manage their page and it’s impressive.

Picture – Aaron Reid

Outside of Facebook people can configure Google Analytics within their web sites using a hidden HTML code in the footer and volia. It’s a bit of a trick to set it up but once it’s done, there are more metrics than you can shake a stick at.

Picture – Aaron Reid

Web sites are now starting to add an internal page to display these metrics and with the web site builder Weebly, they have added a basic set of metrics for analysis that is basically a simplified version of Google Analytics.

WEEBLY

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WORDPRESS

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Measurement and understanding of social media is the only way to measure your successes, failures and how it relates to your audience.

There are so many different types of social media and finding out your audience is so important. Where is your audience, how is your audience using social media? Some platforms have more value than others. Facebook is the one with the largest world audience followed closely by YouTube and WhatsApp. It simple terms, value can be determined by the number of active users.

Graphic – https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-networks-ranked-by-number-of-users/

That’s some staggering numbers! It’s no wonder the Russians used Facebook to manipulate the US 2016 election. The power of television no longer holds the same kind of value it once had.

One company that has done a terrific job on social media is Wendys. It’s easy to think it would be a tough promoting hamburgers and fries all day long but they have done a fantastic job transitioning from listening to participating.

They break the rules of social media engagement by using sarcasm and humor and people are loving it. (No pun intended…) They do such a great job, it went viral as an article on Bored Panda!

Source: https://www.boredpanda.com/funny-wendy-jokes/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=organic

I just love the fact that they turned user engagement into something so much more by participating.

Picture: Aaron Reid

Scrolling through a Facebook timeline is something we do every day. And every day each and every post is fighting through the noise to grab your attention. Sometimes it’s a breaking news story, sometimes is a brilliant cat video and everything in between. But which one will the viewer interact with? If a Facebook post doesn’t interest the viewer, they keep scrolling and it’s lost forever. One of the ways to really stand out in social media is great photography.

PHOTOGRAPHY TIP #1

Composition. Something you’ll hear a lot in photography is rules and when it comes to composition, we need to talk about something called the Rule of Thirds and it’s actually very simple. Your frame is divided into 9 equal parts so that it resembles a tic tac toe playing area: 3 rectangles across and 3 down. The idea is to place the key elements of the image along one or more of the lines or where the lines intersect.

Picture: Aaron Reid

Notice how the child is to the right side of the image and not centered. By following the rule of thirds, you are showing off more of the environment that the child is playing in making it a far more interesting composition.

PHOTOGRAPHY TIP #2

Portrait Mode. The easiest way to get a photo to social media is with a cell phone. There are so many great smartphones on the market right now and one of the most important things people look for nowadays is the camera. Today’s smartphone camera has a number of different modes and one of the most useful is something called “Portrait Mode” or sometimes “Aperture Mode”.

Picture: Aaron Reid

In Portrait mode, the camera adjusts the camera settings to blur the background slightly so that the main focus in on the subjects. This is a great technique when you have very busy backgrounds and want to keep the focus on your subject. This effect actually mimics the look of using a very expensive “portrait” lens on a DSLR camera so it always tends to make your photography look more professional.

PHOTOGRAPHY TIP #3

Framing. Over the summer we ended up in downtown Toronto and I decided to take my daughter to Nathan Phillips Square for a few photos. Obviously, we took our photos in front of the TORONTO sign but I was looking for something different. I took the regular tourist pictures but it wasn’t until my daughter sat down inside one of the letters for a selfie that I knew I had the photo I was looking for.

I used the inside of the big letter “O” to frame the buildings in the background and moved in closer for a tight shot to create an oval frame. In taking this photo, it also was a great technique to get rid of all of the unwanted tourists walking around and have a nice clean focus on your subject while still showcasing where we were at the time.