Analytics, Social Media Management and Research Impact

Sebastian Stevens is an Associate Lecturer and Research Assistant at Plymouth University. He teaches research methods to social science students specialising in quantitative methods. He is on twitter @sebstevens99 and has a blog site at www.everydaysocialresearch.com. 

A key benefit that social media can bring to social science research is through impact and engagement. Demonstrating how a research project will achieve impact and engage the public is a key requirement of most social science research bids today, with many funders looking for more than the traditional conference and journal article as being sufficient. Funders today want to see not only how your research will contribute to the current body of knowledge, but also how your research could impact other areas of academia as well as providing public engagement and economic and societal wide benefits.

To promote your research to the widest possible audience, it is often necessary to use a number of Social Media platforms in order to access different populations. It is also now possible to measure this level of engagement through the use of web analytics with the two most common social media platforms (Facebook and Twitter) both providing free access to analytic software for their users. Managing the content and evaluating the impact of a number of social media platforms can however become tiresome and laborious, an issue overcome by the use of a Social Media Management System (SMMS).

The benefits of using a SMMS are vast and take the hassle out of managing multiple social media platforms for your research for a reasonable yearly subscription. There are many SMMS on the market today with an example that I am currently using on a project being Hootsuite. This particular SMMS provides a research team the benefits of:

1.    Scheduling – Researchers are busy people and have little time to manage multiple social media accounts. With a SMMS you can schedule posts to be sent to multiple social media platforms at times of the day known to deliver the largest impact.

2.    Enhanced analytics – The standard analytics of the accounts included in the SMMS are available in one place, alongside extra features including Google Analytics and Klout scores.  

3.    Streams – These provide the opportunity to keep up to date with features of your accounts such as your newsfeeds, retweets, mentions, hashtag usage plus many others.

4.    Multiple Authors – Multiple authors can be added to the system taking the responsibility away from one member of the team.

5.    RSS/Atom feeds – You can keep up with updates of other websites related to your research by adding the RSS/Atom feeds to the system.

By adopting the use of a SMMS a research team has a centralised, hassle free dashboard in which to create and post content alongside evaluating its impact. Each management system comes at a different price and includes different features, however most will take the hassle out of managing your social media platforms and provide greater opportunities to evaluate your research impact.

 

 

 

Under constant surveillance: A video about the collected volume “Media, Surveillance and Identity”

By María Belén Conti, student in the MA in Social Media at the University of Westminster.

I have directed a movie about the collected volume “Media, Surveillance and Identity” that has been edited by André Jansson and Miyase Christensen.Watch the video interview here! https://vimeo.com/91504300

As early as 1995, John Thompson was talking of a world of “mediated visibility” in which technology was a double-edged sword, since it allowed the few people in power positions to control the many, but also empowered the many to control those few. Since then, many things have changed, with the Internet growing in importance as well as with the appearance of a new actor: social media.

In these social and networked spaces, private and public communications merge and the invisible turns visible. It is no longer easy to maintain the private sphere private and unintended audiences may reach any message we send. But these unintended audiences that have access to our communications are not only other users but also government agencies and companies, as Edward Snowden’s revelations known as the “NSA affair” and the many forms of targeted advertising can testify.

In other words, we are always potentially under surveillance or monitoring by others, either peers, companies or states. Even though that does not mean that we are all the time under one-on-one monitoring, the potential is there. And most of the times, there is a big power asymmetry, since people sometimes do not even know that they are being watched or, if they do, they feel powerless or out of options.

Even though it can be argued that people can use social and networked media for free in exchange of giving up some personal information, as Miyase Christensen explains in the video, people are in fact paying a very big price for that supposedly free use. Mark Andrejevic argues in this context in the collected volume that data has become “the new oil” or commodity exchanged and commercialized for the “free use” of services.

In other words, even though people may think they are the clients of these social and networked media, they are in fact the product being sold to advertisers in order to make profits. What is more, they are “unpaid workers”, as Allmer, Fuchs, Kreilinger and Sevignani argued in the collected volume, since they are producing all the data being sold to the advertisers, who will then target those same users with specific forms of ads, according to their taste and interests.

But is an alternative to that commercial model possible? In fact, there are some alternative social media such as Diaspora* which intend to protect the data of the users. However, people want to be where most of their peers are, so it is hard to make them migrate to this alternative social media. And in the lack of better solutions, or at least until a better idea comes, education and better legislation to protect users are needed, as both Miyase Christensen and André Jansson, editors of the book Media, Surveillance and Indentity. Social perspectives, point out in my video.