Presenting Social Media Data to stakeholders, whether your boss, team or client, can be rather tricky without a little planning. But like most processes, once you have a simple rinse and repeat path plan, you’ll look like you know what you’re doing and be ready to do your own Michael J Fox Secret of My Success montage right to the top of the business world…Well kinda.
If you want to show all of your findings in a clear, concise manner that helps the decision making process, then keep the following points in mind:
1. Embrace the variety of graphs – You have an abundance of graph layout options to pick from so choose wisely as some graphs are better suited to presenting certain types of data than other.
Scatter plot – good for showing the correlation between two or more data sets.
Pie graph – good for showing proportions. So, for example, you could use it to show how the social media marketing budget is being spread between Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram.
Line graph – good for showing trends and repeated patterns in your data especially month to month.
Bar chart – good for comparison data.
Table – great for going into greater detail.
Make sure that your graphs are simple and not too intricate. Where possible, your stakeholders need to be able to glean key points from your presentation without the need for commentary.
2. Present in black and white – Start your presentations in black and white and add colour when needed to highlight specific key points.
3. Tailor the presentation to your audience – Clients and Directors are busy people and need to be able to make decisions without exhaustive explanation. As such, tailor your presentation to ensure the key information is easy to interpret. You can always provide tables with greater detail should they require it.
4. Keep it simple – Keep things in sequential order and don’t over complicate with images, logos and colours.
5. Use tools you are confident with – If you’re an excel junky then stick to excel.
Key Takeaways:
- All graphs aren’t created equal—each one is designed to display data in a certain way and some are better than others.
- A pie chart is a great way to display how an ad campaign budget is being spent.
“In order to sell the value of social media, you need to know how to present the data clearly in order to make a persuasive case.”
Read more: https://blog.hootsuite.com/how-to-visualize-social-media-data/
