Transcript of a Leaky Paywall Insights session (Pete Ericson and Wally) discussing social media analytics dashboards. They review a Facebook dashboard showing reach, likes, comments, and how seasonal trends and historical views inform posting strategy and subscriptions; then they examine YouTube metrics, emphasizing YouTube’s search power, video performance, and potential to drive traffic, subscriptions, and revenue for publishers.
Chapters
All right, let's jump into a couple of the social connections that we've built, Facebook being the first one. And, Wally, what do you think about this dashboard?
I like this. I think social is a big lever for publishers to use, and the dashboard really lets us understand how this is affecting the business and what's coming from it. So, you know, and it gives us ways to look at things and be able to optimize our social efforts. So, you know, this client right now, we look at reach, we look at organic Reach, which is the same. They're not paying for anything at this point. We look at likes, we look at comments. We just try to get a sense of how social is trending for this client. As you can see, this is an outdoor client, so we always find in period over period that summer months, especially the end of July into August, people are outdoors. So we sort of expect some of this to drop for these folks. But it's a. It's a great tool. The. The piece on the right is automatically sorted by date. You could sort it by likes by clicking on that column. And now you're going to see your most popular posts. Right.
That's fantastic.
Yeah. Great way to look at it. If you want to kind of get a pulse of what is resonating and what is working, you can look at it from that perspective.
Yeah, I would say that comments are also. That's a big measure of engagement. So if you're getting a lot of comments on certain types of posts.
Yep, absolutely. And then down the bottom left, you know, we're tracking this back to transactions, which are subscriptions, Right? Yep. You know, I think a lot of these are free subs for this client, but that's great. Get somebody in on a free sub and then through email and, you know, you're going to convert a good percentage of those folks.
Yeah, well, there is some conversion here, so that's cool.
Absolutely. So a great page that, you know, and all the social pages are similar, so we probably don't need to go through them all. But a great page that really lets you know how your social is performing and what you can do to make it better. Yeah.
Nice stuff.
Yeah. It's also great from a historical perspective to be able to go back and look and see even last year, how did your post do heading into Q4, heading into any month, look at September last year, what was popular, what. What resonated well, and start to build posts based on that, especially for seasonal publications. Absolutely. Yeah.
All right. And then let's take a look at YouTube and what kind of data we're pulling from there.
This is a fun one. I think a lot of the insights clients use YouTube. This client doesn't use it to the extent that they think they could, but it's still a great way to look at your, your YouTube statistics, right down to the, the revenue that it's driving. So if you're, if you're a publisher who really leverages YouTube and their immense search power to get, you know, people to your articles.
Yeah.
Page, you're gonna, you're gonna be in this page all the time being able to pull it into one place.
Absolutely. Well, YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world.
Yeah, it's great. And again, I think, I think publishers could use it, you know, as a, as a huge boost to their, their traffic and their subscriptions.
Well, you can quickly see also, you know, what's really working. You know, as far as, you know, this might not be a lot of views, but you can clearly see which one is, is outperforming everything else.
Correct. And if you didn't have this, you would be looking at your YouTube statistics through YouTube. So again, it's going to another page to have to find this data. Right. We're pulling it all into one place. Yep.
