The past couple of weeks have been big for user data. Let’s recap on what’s been happening, shall we?
- Last week, Twitter saw a massive (that’s a huge understatement) data breach targeting verified accounts. This was allegedly carried out by bitcoin burglars.
- Last month, India banned TikTok after branding it (and 58 other apps) to be a security threat. Now, rumours are rife that America will follow suit.
- Facebook – Do we need to say more? Facebook has been facing a maelstrom of data misuse allegations ever since the Cambridge Analytica whistleblowers came forward.
So what kind of data is available to brands and platforms? Why is our data so precious? We thought we’ll answer a few questions from an agency’s perspective.
We’re on a bus and it’s driven by data
Platforms like Facebook or Twitter store a lot of user-level data. Though it’s mostly anonymized, it’s what makes them vulnerable to hacks. But as Admins of various brand pages and websites, we do have access to some user data. The data we see is always aggregated. As opposed to knowing “Adithi shared your story via DM,” we’ll see that 1 person shared our story.
Here are some of the key metrics:
- Actions/Activity: Actions on Facebook and Activity on Instagram allow us to understand what you guys (our followers) do when you’re on our Page. It shows us how many of you have visited our profile, clicked to visit our website or “Get Directions.”
- Audiences: We are also privy a breakdown of our audience by age group, gender and some of their preferences (on Facebook only.) This informs us about who is interested in our page, what other things the audience is interested in, and what time are you looking at our pages and posts.
- Shares: Platforms are able to capture how many times you’ve shared our posts or stories with others. We don’t know who has shared the posts/stories. However, we know that 20 of you did – and we’re hoping at least 18 of you shared it because the content was good!
- Engagement Rate: This is a simple formula that calculates how many of you “engage” with our content. “Engagements” are clicks, likes, shares, or comments on our posts. This number is divided by the total number of people who’ve seen the post to arrive at the metric.
- Top Performing Posts: All platforms give us a scoreboard of our most engaging or liked posts.
- Drop-Off Points/Exit Rate: This is exclusively available for websites. This tells us where and how many customers dropped-off from a website.
We’re in a data-eat-data world
We’ve all had the surreal experience of thinking about something and seeing an ad for it the next minute. Such accuracy is due to massive amounts of data being captured by various platforms and sites. All this data, when looked at together, helps brands and companies target consumers with increasingly relevant content and ads.
You could avoid such targeting by going off the grid. Let’s be honest, how many of us can survive without these networking platforms or the internet today? With that said, it’s crucial to now decide whether we should be paid for the data we inevitably share with these tech giants.
See you next week!
