This is the second part in a series of posts detailing how to maximize your listening efforts by following the social media search cycle. This post will cover how to categorize and report on your social media search results.

The first step in the social media search cycle is defining and refining search terms to suit your need. After adding your terms the data begin to flow. This can be the most difficult point of the social media search cycle.

Staring at a mass of qualitative data can be daunting, especially for marketing departments, P.R. firms, or small businesses that are new to social media. Using the proper social media tracking tools you can turn this flow of data into useful, quantifiable, and persuasive information.

Categories, Organization, Success

After adding your search terms, it can be enlightening and even fun to check out your search’s feed. This is a great place to start thinking of how your business, product, service, or personal brand can be categorized. Looking at the results is helpful because you can see how the public defines or identifies your brand in their own terms, which may be contrary to your expectations.

If you were tracking social media for a local university, mentions would span a wide variety of categories: sports teams, blog posts about the history of the school, people attending events, staffers chatting about work, student complaints, graduation, student orientation, alumni, and even foursquare check-ins through Twitter.

These categories are interesting, but should be refined depending on what you and your organization want to accomplish. If you want to gauge student satisfaction, tagging every post written by a student with “student” and adding sentiment (positive, negative, neutral) would be useful. If you want to track student problems, tagging student posts with “student” and “problem” would allow you to track student issues against the general student mentions.

Tagging is a common and well understood activity on the web, but the Looxii system takes this process a step further with tag groups. By grouping your tags together, creating a useful report becomes much easier. Taking the example above, a useful tag group would be “author type,” with tags to account for “students,” “parents,” “alumni,” “visitors,” etc.

This allows you to gain insight into who is conversing about your brand and why. When using these categories in conjunction with other tags (i.e. “promotion,” “complaint”) you can easily see and chart where you should focus your promotional or crisis response efforts.

Don’t forget the personal

A common trick of P.R. firms and agencies is to pull out a couple of key Tweets, Facebook posts, or a YouTube videos that are insightful, funny, or support their findings. While you work through the social media mentions in your feed, it can be easy to get distracted by an interesting post. Social media is social after all. For these items you should create a tag called “quote” which you can pull up later when you begin to create your reports. Keeping the personal aspect in your reporting helps to remind everyone why tracking this information is helpful.

Reporting Made Easy

After you feel comfortable with your categories and and you have tagged recent mentions, you have done 90% of the work. The Looxii Graphs page automatically breaks each of your tag groups into its own graph, showing your data over time and in summary in an easy to read format. All that you need to do is set your time frame and export the graph images that are most useful to you.

If you are interested in a subset of data, i.e. just the “students” in the tag group “author type,” you can use the filters near the top to view subsets of data. As you create your reports, don’t forget the interesting mentions that you tagged “quote.” You can pull these up by going to the Looxii Feed page and filter the feed by the “quote” tag.

Refine the Process

Ultimately, it’s about looking at your data and determining what you want to get out of social media reports. Because of the social nature of the mentions and the differing web presence that each organization may have, determining the best categorical breakdowns for your reports and refining which categories you use over time is important. Thinking of social media tracking as a cycle can help to keep your reporting relevant to you and your organization.