Analyze social media traffic of analysts to determine your workload

A common issue that AR managers bring up when discussing why they currently don’t follow analysts on blogs and Twitter is that it would be too much work. Hmm, maybe it could be a lot of work, but really the reality is that it does not take much time per day tracking posts and tweets. Why? 

• There are not many analysts in any particular market who use social media
• Tools are available (e.g., RSS readers and Twitter Search) that make it easy and fast to track posts and tweets

Something that AR should do is work from facts and not assumptions so we recommend that AR managers conduct an analysis of their top analysts’ use of social media. This analysis should cover at least the previous three weeks to smooth out changes in usage due to travel, special events like analyst summits, holidays, and so on. Data to be gathered includes the number of blog posts for both firm and personal blogs and the overall number of tweets  

The analysis concentrates on the average number of social media publications per day. In the tests and beta client engagements of our new SageTool^TM Analyst Social Media Traffic Analysis (see graphic) we found that most analyst lists only had a small percentage of analysts that actively used social media and that the volume of traffic was modest. Of course there are a few analysts with exceptionally heavy user of social media, but so far they are rare.  We also found that AR managers with accurate facts were significantly less anxious about tracking analysts.

Once you have completed the analysis you have the data to enter into the tracking tools,   Those AR managers who are trained on tools to use to efficiently track posts and tweets, have embraced adding social media to their other research tracking (e.g., research notes and press quotes).  These tools can provide great analyst opinion tracking to be factored into your overall performance metrics.

SageCircle Technique:

• Create a process to capture data about your top analysts’ use of social media
• Gather data including posts from firm blogs, analysts personal blogs, and analyst tweets
• Analyze the data to estimate the average volume of traffic per day
• Deploy tools that make day-to-day monitoring of analyst posts and tweets easy and efficient
• Incorporate social media content into the AR metrics program

Bottom Line: With analyst usage of social media growing it is critical that AR managers start to monitor analyst commentary in social media. However, many AR programs are reluctant to add this data because of the perception that there would be significant effort required. To overcome this perception, AR programs should conduct an analysis of actual analyst usage of social media to determine the facts of how much work monitoring would require.

Like this idea, but don’t want to do work creating a tool, gathering the data, and analyzing for a report? SageCircle can help.  SageCircle has created a service for analyzing analyst social media traffic based on vendors’ analyst lists. The service uses our SageTool^TM Analyst Social Media Traffic Analysis and provides recommendations.

• The service comes in three levels: Bronze (US$195), Silver (US$395) and Gold (US$595)
• The service is included with the Annual Advisory Service
• The service is eligible for the Blocks of Advisory Hours Exchange Program
• Online SageContent^TM Library seat holders can download the SageTool from the library

Why stress out about performing this analysis when you can have SageCircle do the work for you? Contact us at “info [at] sagecircle [dot] com” or 503-636-1500 for more information and setting up a purchase order. Click here to purchase a SageCircle “Analyst Social Media Traffic Analysis” service using your credit card.

Question: AR – Do you monitor analyst commentary on social media, especially blogs and Twitter? If no, why not? If yes, what tools do you use and how much time do you devote to it on a daily and weekly basis?