Help: Social Media

ActiveCampaign’s Email Marketing software provides a ton of social features, including social media reporting.  With the Social Media features of the software, you will be able to add Facebook, Twitter, Digg, etc., links to your campaigns.  These links would allow your subscribers to share or like your campaign.  This will enable you to have a more dynamic campaign that touches on the Social Media component of your Email Marketing efforts.  The reports on the Social Media links would allow you to gain valuable information that could help you with future campaigns.

Viewing Social Media Reports

You can access Social Media reports in three ways.

1.  After sending a campaign, click on the “View Report” button. This will take you to the Reports page.
2.  Click on the Reports tab to go to the Reports page.
3. Click on the Campaigns tab. Locate the Campaign you wish to view the reports for. Click on the “Reports” link to the lift of the Campaign Name.

Once on the Reports page, you can click on the “View Reports” link to the left of the campaign that you wish to view the report for. On the Campaign Reports page click on the Social Sharing tab.  This page will show the total amount of social shares, for both Facebook and Twitter.

How are Facebook and Twitter Sharing Totals Obtained?

Sharing totals for Facebook and Twitter are currently obtained in the following manner:

1. If sharing directly from the email (by clicking social share icons within the email), the subscriber who clicked the icon will be tracked – the software will know that particular subscriber clicked the icon. This can be used later for social actions and segments.
2. If sharing outside of our interface, such as directly pasting the share link into Facebook or Twitter, or by clicking the share icons that reside in various permanent spots (such as the Campaign Reports page, or public message and social views), data will be obtained from both Facebook and Twitter and added to the Campaign Reports page.

NOTE: Facebook shares are indicated by the number of subscribers who have clicked the Facebook icon within email messages. For each subscriber, you will see a matching row indicating when they clicked the Facebook icon:

If a Facebook user obtains the share link through some other means, and proceeds to share directly on Facebook (without clicking on the Facebook icon in the email), the software will obtain that share count, and append it to the reports:

The above screenshot indicates that 1 person (who is not a subscriber to your list) shared this campaign on Facebook.

Twitter data is obtained through a public search method, and in most cases captures all mentions of a particular link. Due to some limitations from Twitter, sometimes, if multiple Twitter users post the same exact link, those tweets will be removed from the search results.

Extending Social Data

Once social data is obtained within the Email Marketing software, you can export it, and create list segments from it.

1. To Export data from the Social Sharing report, click the Export link on the Social Sharing page of your Campaign’s report.
   Below is an example of a CSV exported file from the Social Media reports of ActiveCampaign’s Email Marketing software.
2. To create a List Segment based on Social Sharing data, You could choose the “Has shared socially” from the dropdown as a condition and then choose the campaign and Social Media site.  (For instructions on creating List Segments, please go here)
3. You can also create subscriber actions that are based on subscribers’ clicks on any social share icon (within the email body).

More questions?

For more information about this feature or any feature of our Email Marketing software, please contact our Support Department.  We would be happy to assist you.

Related posts:

1. Activating Facebook Social Media Reporting
2. Using Personalization Tags in your Email Messages