During the course of this project, I researched many different aspects of using

social media to market a product. Although I thought I had done some very detailed
research and planning for the Eye Observe social media sites, the results for the actual
goal of gaining downloads for the app was not achieved to the amount of work put into
the sites. Throughout the program, I learned many things, and quite a few were from
the last week of feeling like a failure for the amount of downloads the app had
achieved in its first two weeks on the market. Had the download not been available in
time for the formative assessment, looking at the analytics for the Twitter and Pinterest
sites would have seemed very impressive. Both of those social media sites analytically
seemed to be very successful in finding viewers. The following formative assessment
sections will provide an overview of the analytics for the Twitter and Pinterest site, as
well as a summary of the Facebook site.
Twitter overall analytics
I believe the overall Twitter analytics for the project were actually fairly
impressive. By the time the creation of this formative assessment began, the Eye
Observe had over 170 regular followers, and over 50 other users who had Eye Observe
on lists in their account where they could follow by opening a specific list instead of
seeing the information in their general account.
For the 28 day period covering March 13, 2016 to April 8 2016, the Eye Observe
account Tweets earned over 35,400 impressions over Twitter. Impressions are the
times the tweets reached another users stream- either through being a follower of the
account or through using search terms to find material.
This was a great improvement over the 28 day time period covering February 24,
2016 to March 22, 2016, where only approximately 21,000 impressions were made
from the account. Although these two data collections overlap, it shows a great
improvement in the second collection of analytics. From this increase, I can infer that
what I was doing with the Twitter account was working to gain follower, viewers, and
interactions with the Twitter community.
When looking at impressions for individual tweets that were made specifically to
advertise and inform the audience about Eye Observe being available and free, there
were approximately 10,000 views/impressions of these posts from March 30, 2016
through April 8, 2016. It continues to astound me that with so many views, there were
so few actual downloads of the free advertised Eye Observe app. Twitter analytics
counted 126 engagements to these advertising tweets. An engagement is any type of
click on a tweet, which can include a like a re-tweet or a click on a link, hashtag, avatar
or username. Twitter calls the results of the engagements on the impressions the
engagement rate, and our advertising tweets then had an engagement rate of just
over 1.26% overall.
Twitter Audience Analysis
By the time the creation of this formative assessment began, the Eye Observe
Twitter account had over 170 followers. The most surprising part of the breakdown of
the followers was that only 55% of the followers were listed as being in the United
States, with almost 12% of the total followers being in the state of California. United

States followers were also seen at 4% each in New York and Texas, and 3% each in
Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio.
Great Britain had over 19% of the Eye Observe followers, India 5% of the
followers, and Australia 4% of the followers. Other international followers were in
assorted countries from around the world, including but not limited to the Philippines,
Canada, Ireland, Brazil and Portugal.
Twitter users are prompted to list general interests that they have in their
account. 73% of the Twitter followers were interested in education news and
information as well as Tech news. 64% were interested in technology, 62% in online
education, 57% in entrepreneurship, and 49% in business news as well as leadership.
Twitter analytics also provides what they call organic audience analytics, which
are the analytics for everyone who has looked into your tweets or account, not just your
followers. I had never looked at this analytical portion prior to this week, but it was very
interesting to see how numbers changed, or even the new analytical information that
was provided. Because our overall impressions consisted of impressions from followers
as well as this organic audience, this information is important as well.
The most important information from this organic audience was the mobile
footprint that they possessed. From the analytics I could see that 55% of the organic
audience used/owned iOS devices, which was what we needed from a sales position for
our iPad app. Interestingly, that meant that 45% of our organic audience did not
possess the technology necessary to download the app at all. 93% of our audience did
have access to or owned a desktop/laptop computer. Which prompts the idea that
possibly Eye Observe would benefit from an option to download to a computer, where a
separate webcam could video performances and allow the user to video from the front
of the laptop while making notes from the back of the laptop at the same time. In a
similar discovery, all Twitter iOS users/owners could be separated for analytics, and
none of their top 10 interests had anything to do with education, coaching, technology or
the like. In fact, across the board most Twitter user categories had top 10 interests that
were in line with entertainment (music or movies) or general news and politics. The
analytics for Eye Observe users stood out as the only category I found where the users
were actually overwhelmingly interested in education, technology, education and
business news. This was a positive thing to see, as it meant that we were finding and
continuing to reach out to what our target audience really needed to be for our product.
Interestingly, just over 7% of our organic audience did not list English as their
language of use. Another interesting analytical portion to this organic audience was that
it rated consumer buying styles, and although the majority of our followers and organic
audience had interests in technology and education, the consumer buying styles of our
organic audience only had information about different types of food, wireless carriers,
automotive information, and television shows the audience preferred. No other
consumer information could be found on the analytical pages, and none of the provided
consumer information matched what we intended our audience to be interested in.
Pinterest
Overall, the Pinterest account was the 2nd most visited account of the three
social media sites I focused on (Twitter was #1, Facebook was #3). Over the course of

time, Pinterest will be the account that ends up with the most visitors, as there is no
timeline to the Pins, and the majority of Pins reach their half-life almost 6 months after
creation. The good news is that in the 30 day timespan from March 10 to April 8th
2016, there were an average of 1,065 daily impressions of the pins on the Eye Observe
profile, coming from over 800 individual daily viewers. Over 8,000 viewers visited an
Eye Observe posted pin at some point of the month. The daily views increased
throughout the month, with only 184 views on March 10th, but topping out at 2,120
views on April 6th. This shows the way that Pinterest increases over time. The bad
news is that the Eye Observe advertising pins had less than 100 impressions over the
30 day time period. Because Pinterest is focused on sharing information in the social
setting, many of the most popular pins or pin boards were not focused specifically on
Eye Observe itself.
For the future of using Pinterest, the analytics showed that adding advertising
or informational Eye Observe pins should actually focus on some sort of motivational
factor. There was a board in our Pinterest account that focused on Motivation for
Teachers/Coaches, and this board had over 100x the impressions of the next most
visited board in our account, and over 200x the repins of any other board. Looking
closer into the analytics, the pins that were the most popular also had no hashtags
included in the descriptions- which meant that the ways to make your information stand
out on Twitter actually had the opposite effect in Pinterest.
Facebook
Facebook was absolutely the most difficult site to manage. At the beginning of
the project, I would have suspected that Facebook would actually be the easiest of the
three sites. In the long run, the Facebook site really necessitated the use of paying for
advertising. Not only did this cause many other issues that were time consuming,
overwhelming, and difficult- but it counteracted the initial idea of why to use social
media marketing in the first place. The main point in using social media marketing was
to create what was essentially free marketing platforms for a product. To have to pay on
Facebook to gain the necessary viewers may not have been the best way to advertise
the app to begin with. Both Twitter and Pinterest also had options to pay for promoting
the Eye Observe sites, but both of those sites also had many views per day without the
aid of the paid promotions. Facebook sat stagnant without the pay-for advertising
option.
One of the main take-aways from this project and Facebook is that Facebook
really is designed for social media that concerns individual people contacting and
visiting the pages of people who they know. Other issues ended up being that business
pages are most likely to be followed if they have a check-in feature (used mainly for
restaurants, or in-person shopping sites), or already having an email database that the
business can send out information to like the Facebook page. Smaller or newer
businesses need to send people to their Facebook site from outside of Facebook- they
are not likely to be found by random users searching for them. That is why the paid
advertising is necessary for a business that does not have the previously made
connections to the audience. Although Facebook has the most users, it is also the
hardest (or least likely) to have users individually look for new businesses or material to
add to their pages.

Suggested Future Focuses

Overall, it seemed that the viewers were available on Twitter and Pinterest, but
the advertising focused material was not engaging enough to create a sense of
urgency in the viewers to actually download the app when it was available. We had an
audience for the material, but somehow it wasnt acted upon. Future focuses need to
be on creating engaging advertising that creates a sense of urgency for the viewer to
in effect download NOW, without reading the material and then continuing to scroll past
it or plan to download it later and then forget about it.
Another future focus might be to actually contact individual schools with the information
about the Eye Observe app. Whether in letters or emails, the direct contact with
educators or coaches in the professional environment might be beneficial to trying to
find the audience in their social media time (which is not always geared toward the user
looking for professional interests, and instead used as a social outlet for
contacting/interacting with friends and family). It might be considered old school, but a
11x14 or larger sized poster for school teacher lounges might be more useful as an
advertising tool when the app is being offered for free. This would ensure advertising
contact with the potential users when they are actually still in work mode, and also
when they are in possession with the school or coaching environment tools. When
schools offer campus-only access to iPads for teachers, it may be difficult for them to
see the advertising on a social media site and then remember to bring the information to
work with them later on to actually download the app.