Comparing social media data and insights

By Tuija Aalto (Yle) and Rasmus Thaarup (DR)

The Nordic public service broadcasters view social media as a very necessary tool for publishing as well as for initiating and maintaining dialogue with the people who use and appreciate our content and pay for our existence.

Producing content for social publishing is elementary to maintain the strong relationship with the audiences. Our citizens must encounter public service content on platforms and in formats they use everyday.

In order to understand how we are doing, we need quality data. As Nordic countries, we are in a unique position: we have quite similar media markets, so it makes sense to compare our performance on social media. This is what the Nordvision-funded live KPI dashboard enables us to do.

This project, which have been co-funded by Nordvision and developed by digital agency Mingler, have resulted in the establishment of a live KPI Dashboard as well as a data tool for generating standardized insights reports and comparable metrics.

This collaboration is pretty unique when we compare ourselves with the rest of the European public service landscape: as far as we know, no other broadcasters are comparing and sharing insights and data, as well as standardizing their social media key metrics, to this extent.

Things are moving fast within the social media measurement landscape. Thus, we must constantly keep the pace in terms of measuring the right user behavior across Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and Twitter.

This round of development focused on the measurement of Facebook and YouTube behavior: new key metrics now include total time consumption, new engagement metrics, aggregated uniques across longer periods and more detailed metrics within demographics.

The new metrics speed up the data insights process, making us capable of understanding more detailed user behavior patterns. It all empowers us to make even better decisions in terms of content and distribution.

The nordic broadcasters have been collaborating within social media since 2015.

Tuija Aalto is Head of Market intelligence and Social media in Yle and Rasmus Thaarup is Audience Analyst and Head of Social Media Research at DR.