The brief from Noogle was a question: how does the same content perform on Twitter and on Instagram, and why differently? The people asking were the Maps channel managers, who had to decide what to post and when. Their answer lived in a Google Sheet.
The sheet was only as fresh as the last time it was filled. Every week, by my own account, ten analysts gathered each country’s raw data by hand, so the numbers were always days old and the analysts spent their week collecting instead of reading.
The briefZero human input of raw data.
Noogle asked for a Tableau dashboard with more features than the sheet, intuitive navigation and a pleasant layout, and for no one to type a raw number into it again: a single view of the Noogle Maps social footprint, both networks side by side, and a way down to every post.
Stop collecting the numbers. Start reading them.
The peopleDesign for the person who presents the number.
The executives the channel managers reported to were not available for interviews. So we studied them indirectly: a netnographic study of what they read, such as Forbes, Bloomberg and The New York Times, plus focus groups and workshops with the people who reported to them. What made a deliverable look diligent in front of that executive became the research question.
Carolyn would never open the dashboard herself. Her channel managers would, and they had to walk into her office with a number they could defend and the post behind it.
When to post?
Engagement rate by the day a post went out, the view channel managers asked for most. Each network on its own scale.
- Sun0.20%
- Mon0.20%
- Tue0.18%
- Wed0.23%
- Thu0.45%
- Fri0.26%
- Sat0.26%
- Sun4.5%
- Mon5.6%
- Tue5.2%
- Wed5.2%
- Thu5.9%
- Fri5.9%
- Sat4.4%
The productBoth networks, always side by side.
The hub reads top to bottom in three levels, each network in its own colour. The filters at the top follow you down every level, so the comparison is never lost. And every chart carries its quarter-on-quarter change, because the question in the room is always “is that up?”
Read across both networks and the story of 2017 jumps out. In the fourth quarter, Twitter impressions rose 296% and Instagram’s average post reach rose 112%. The low level shows why.
Down the three levels
The same dashboard, read from the health of the quarter down to its posts.
Redrawn in vector. Every value is the dashboard’s own; where a tile and a chart disagree, the chart is used.
The outcomeContent made for each network.
With both networks side by side and fresh every day, the differences stopped being a finding in a report and became a working habit: channel managers began to make content for each network. The analysts moved from gathering data to analysing content and strategy.
Four months after launch, engagement on both networks was up between 25% and 45%. That figure is my own; I do not have Noogle’s own measurement to link.
The record
What the screen made obvious.
Day of the week, redrawn.
- Thursday, on TwitterPosts that went out on a Thursday earned a 0.45% engagement rate, about twice most other days.Dashboard
- The top tweetIt went out on a Thursday: 102,171 impressions and 473 engagements, a 0.46% rate.Dashboard
- Q4 2017Twitter impressions up 296% to 10.58 million; Instagram’s average post up 112% to 135.6 thousand.The dashboard
- December 201755 tweets averaging 186.9 thousand impressions, about 10.3 million in one month: more than any other full quarter in the record.The dashboard, the 2017 matrix