TECH TALK-CREATING A SOCIAL MEDIA

STRATEGY
The articles published on Tech Talk Cover specialized domains such as business analytics ,e-
governance, e-commerce ,Internet –based technologies ,big data analytics, social media,
information systems project management, telecommunication management system, strategic
management framework using information and communication technologies.
 ASSIGNMENT QUESTIONS
1. What are the different ways websites get traffic ?
2. What are the different search engine optimization approaches ?
3. What are the different models for social media promotion ?
4. Which websites should Khare focus on, and how should he promote on these sites ?
5. What key performance indicators should Khare focus on in promoting Tech Talk on social media ?
6. What methodologies can be used for social media analytics ?
7. What are the major topics of discussion on Tech Talk ?
8. What does the emotion analysis of Tech Talk content imply ?
9. Comment on the polarity of tweets posted by Tech Talk ?
10. What does the network of top Tech Talk followers imply ?
11. How can Khare identify potential influencers from among his subscriber base and
engage with them appropriately ?
12. Should Khare manage social media marketing in –house or outsource it ? If outsourced
,what promotion model should he use ?
 Discussion Plan
Discussion Point

Understanding traffic sources

Understanding the role of social media in search engine optimization

Social media business models and their value drivers

Key information provided by social media data and analytics

Social media analytics for Tech Talk’s Twitter handle

Future Strategies
 ANALYSIS
1. What are the different ways websites get traffic ?
Most websites get most of their traffic organic search, direct traffic, referral traffic, social media, email,
and promotions.
• Organic Traffic is the traffic obtained when users of search engines (such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo
search ) start querying specific term, and the unpaid search results direct the users to the most relevant
pages on the web. This is considered to be the most sustainable source of traffic if the traffic on the
website is not overtly dependent on new content only(as in news websites )
• Direct Traffic is encountered when a visitor types the website address (URL) directly into the browser,
clicks a link to a website inside a document, or has the website bookmarked or set up as the auto –
loading home page.
• Referral Traffic is used to describe visitors to a website who get there by clicking direct links shared or
posted on other websites .Webmasters try to drive their own referral traffic by leaving links on blogs or
forums through comments and interaction.
• Social Media Traffic is a kind of referral traffic where social interactions ,shares and votes traffic from
social media websites. It focuses largely on user –generated content and user-generated
recommendations for drawing traffic. Based on information type and the recommender,
recommendations in a social network have a high rate of adoption.
• Promoted websites traffic focuses on paying search engines, social media websites and other websites
to display advertisements and banners, which draw specific interested user groups to the website.
Promoted website traffic is considered to be unsustainable in the long run, as it is push strategy.
2. What are the different search engine optimization approaches ?

All websites especially content-based websites, depend on general traffic. These websites need
thousands to millions of visits per day to prosper and flourish(e.g. news sites like Mashable and BBC
). Other web based businesses are looking for targeting traffic, where revenue is generated from
selling a product or service, This traffic is like a potential prospect for sales; an individual or an
organization already interested and able to buy it (e.g. solution providers).SEO is the art of driving
such organic traffic from unpaid results to websites with a specific offerings(content, information, or
physical product).The aim is for the webpage to appear towards the beginning of the list when the
user queries the search engine, which provides greater web visibility.
 White Hat SEO

White Hat SEO refers to legal approaches to improving a website’s ranking .Legitimate SEO tactics
include on –page optimization and off-page optimization.
• On- page Optimization is driven by factor such as high-quality content, reasonable count of
keywords in the content ( 3-4 times per hundred words),website design and structure, minimal
usage of iframes, presence of tags and metadata in content ,and sensible interlinking of content.
• Off –page optimization is driven by factors such as acquiring links to the page and domain,
creating social interactions and sharing of the page, adding bookmarking ,quest blogging ,and
listing in relevant high-quality website directories.
 Black Hat SEO
Black hat SEO refers to unapproved SEO tactics ,which may result in a penalty from search engines
if identified. Black Hat SEO tactics are as follows:
• Automatically rerouting doorway pages that, when loaded, redirect the visitor to a different
website completely or to a different web page.
• Keyword suffering ,hidden or invisible text ,and /or hidden links(which cannot be detected or read
by a human being ) so as to confuse a search engine spider.
• Pages loaded with irrelevant words or with lots of keywords, causing search engines to confuse the
content with the domain that these keywords belong to.
• Duplicated content on multiple pages(e.g. massive content in the footer/header) to increase the text
to HTML ratio for the domain, while there continues to be lesser amount of original content.
• Intentionally wrong spelling of a well-known website (google.com, foogle.com) to attract users
who may think it is different website.
• Unrelated and centralized link farms that direct links to the website in order to improve results in
organic search.
3 . What are the different models for social media promotion ?

Social media promotion are paid efforts to promote a web Page’s presence on social media. The
payment can be made to two partiers as follows.

• The first type of paid advertisement is where payment is directly made to the social media website,
as in the case of LinkedIn ,Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter .A major benefit of this type of social
media advertising is that website or content promoters can take advantage of user’s demographic
and psychographic information, and target their advertisements appropriately .Social media
enables, integrative approaches for targeting strategies such as geography-based targeting
,behaviour –based targeting ,and psychographic targeting. These approaches make detailed target
group identification possible in a number of ways with higher accuracy, which ultimately improves
the return on investment on making efforts.
4 . Which websites should Khare focus on, and how should he promote on these sites ?
The functional building blocks of social media and the implications each block can have for how a firm
should engage with various social media platforms and activities. Depending on the functional blocks ,the
nature of the articles and content shared on Tech Talk can be analysed .
Because of the academic ,information –rich nature of Tech Talk content, which has less entertainment
value, more user groups may be attracted to it on professional social network such as LinkedIn .Therefore ,
social websites such as Facebook and Twitter may not suitable as a first choice for drawing attention to it.
In fact, an analysis of Twitter followers shows that technology is not among the top five followed Tech
Talk themes (see case Exhibit 6 ).The demographic details highlight a discrepancy regarding Twitter
followers in terms of geographic location and search traffic (between the data in case Exhibit 6 and the
information on organic search in the section titled “Tech Talk Background ”).This analysis highlights that
the demographic of the target audience of Tech Talk and the demographic and psychographic analysis of
Tech Talk followers are not in sync. The top interested of the followers of Tech Talk were identified as
music, movies, an television, hobbies and interests, music and news ,photography followed by technology,
which was the main focus of Techy Talk.
LinkedIn which is aimed more at professional networking .could be more suitable for gathering a group of
focused subscribers for Tech Talk. LinkedIn facilitates the information of groups among like-minded users,
where highly focused discussions can be easily encouraged.
Another site Khare could consider is Pinterest. As indicated in the case ,there is a lot of focus on
creating infographics an images that make learning interesting. Pinterest operates a photo –sharing
website as well as mobile application. Visitors to Teck Talk can save images and infographics as pins
in their personal collections, called Pin boards. Pinterest is asocial media platform that enables users
to browse images and infographics submitted by other Pinterest users, and save relevant images and
infographics that may be interesting or informative. Users can also “Pin” or bookmark interesting or
informative images and infographics directly from other websites. Therefore, the pins of any
individual user display unique results based on the content that is relevant to that user. Any content
with an image that receives a higher number of pins from many users automatically gets higher
visibility in search engine images-based results or organic search.
5 . What key performance should Khare focus on in promoting Tech Talk on social media ?

The key performance indicators that Khare should focus on are not just the number of subscribers or
votes, but their quality .It can be seen from Twitter that it is not quantity that matters, but quality.
While quantity creates brand awareness, quality of association actually creates conversation and
regular visits (loyalty).
Accordingly, the following metrics could be monitored by Khare for quality :

• Content Quality : Social activity per user

• Usage statistics: Number of comments / shares / votes per post on social media
• Growth in User Relationships: Organic growth of subscribers on Social Media
• Usage Statistics : Link clicks per post on social media
• Usage Interests : Top interest of Subscribers on social media
• Demographics : Geographic location ,educational background ,and age of subscribers on social
media
6 . What methodologies can be used for social media analytics ?
Social media analytics simply means extracting intelligence from the content posted on social media
platforms. It can be a powerful tool for modelling user behaviour to gain enhanced business value. It
comprises three methodologies ,as seen in existing analytical frameworks.

Descriptive Analysis
Descriptive Analysis emphasizes statistics such as tweet/hashtag count, distribution of tweet variety
,user statistic ,and URL data .It focuses on the following metrics:

Tweet Metrics : User metrics often include an analysis of tweet statistics pertaining to the content
and topic of tweets , tweets over time, hashtags in tweets,@ user mentions per tweet ,unique words in
the tweets, and lexical diversity.

User Metrics : These metrics cover user statistics such as status, favourites ,friends and follower
counts, activity and visibility ,and formation of user groups. Details such as account creation date,
location in terms of longitude and latitude, and description can also used for in –depth analysis.

URL Metrics : These metrics compromise useful information on the links in tweets used by the user.
It includes metrics like the number of URLs used in tweets ;tweets groups that share similar URLs
;and top URL domains the user is interested in, following and sharing frequently. A detailed analysis
of URL text can also provide the major topics the user is interested in.
Content Analysis
Twitter data comprises a large amount of unstructured information in the form of tweets and metadata
,including user information. In order to extract any intelligence from this highly, unstructured user-
generated content, steps for cleaning the text are often a precursor to any analysis. Content analysis
focuses on extracting relevant and useful information from this pre-processed text. There are three
types.
Word Analysis : The analysis plays a vital role in any kind of information extracted from
unstructured tweets ,which is helpful in mining keywords and metadata. It can also be used to a make
term documents matrices by using term frequency analysis .Also ,relevant topics can be modelled
using “topic modelling ”,which includes clustered documents level analysis.
Hashtag Analysis : Similar to word analysis ,frequent hashtags can be modelled to gain insights .The
association among users with similar hashtags can also modelled.
Sentiment Analysis :Semantic analysis is useful in extracting hidden semantics from text. The basic
semantic analysis extracts the polarity of the content in terms of negative ,positive ,and neutral
.Beyond polarity ,emotion analysis can be used to classify content on the basis emotional states such
as joy, sadness, and anger.
Network Analysis
Network dynamics play a vital role in miming useful information from the content posted on social
media. Since social networks such as Facebook and Twitter comprise a closely knit network of
friends and followers ,users often interact with other users that share similar interests. The interaction
is often through likes, shares ,retweets, @ mentions ,and following each other’s profile .Metrics
surrounding this network of users and their interactions often fall under network analysis ,as follows:
Topological Analysis : This metric explores network parameters such as network layout and
diameter, the average path length between nodes, and the shortest path of connections between two
non-connected users.
Centrally Analysis : This metric covers parameters such as in/out degree of a user’s connections ;
betweenness centrality; and analysis of users with maximum ties, revealing the most influential users
in the network .The main focus of the analysis is on individual users.
Community Analysis : This metric explores network parameters among different users. Aspects
such as network cohesion( i.e connections between the nodes of the user networks) and identifying
clusters and modules within the network are also covered.

An in depth analysis of Twitter content can be performed by combining these methodologies for
extracting intelligence.
7 . What are the major topics of discussion on Tech Talk ?
Modelling major topics of discussion can give useful insights about what the content on Tech Talk is
all about. To analyse these discussion topics from the collection of Talk Tech tweets ,topic modelling
is often used. It is ,therefore, a critical part of word analysis (under content analysis ) for social
media. Content modelling is a type of statistical tool used in the areas of machine learning and text
mining ,where unstructured textual content is mined for information retrieval. It is often used in text
mining to discover the semantics in the text. To depict the major topics of focus ,a word cloud can be
used to visually represent the content, showing keywords ,metadata ,and frequent hashtags.
Before creating a word cloud ,a term documents matrix is computed ,which reflects the number of
times an identified keyword appears in the text body. An analysis of 3,200 Tech talk tweets shows the
top 10identified topics and their corresponding frequencies (See Exhibit TN-2) .
As shown in case Exhibit 11,word clouds can also be used to illustrate the main topics that are
discussed in tweets posted by Tech Talk. It can be easily observed that Tech Talk is mainly about
technology, business, news ,and TechCrunch, and often shares content from BBC, CNN, Mashable,
and Engadget, which are popular news websites .These insights are obtained after cleaning common
words such as regularly used verbs and prepositions .Other major topics that are often discussed in
the tweets on Tech Talk are related to mobile applications, Facebook, video marketing ,technology,
Google, Apple, management and analytics .The bigger the size of the word in the word cloud ,the
higher is its presence on Tech Talk .
8 . What does the emotion analysis of Tech Talk content imply ?

Emotion are a great way to model user behaviour. The content a person posts(in the form of text ) on
social media can be used to analyse that person’s emotions. Tech Talk posts amounts of its own
content and shares content from various other news and technology portals .Analysing this content
for emotions can be beneficial for modelling general behaviour .The case authors have captured a
total of six different emotions in the tweets on Tech Talk, under frequently discussed topics. This
information gives insight into what topics are discussed in the context of emotional states such as joy,
anger, fear, disgust, surprise, and sadness.
A tweet such as “good to connect with a like –minded professional .Cheers ”is classified under “joy
,” “#Business # News angry Justin Bieber throws down mic, storms off stage during concert "is
classified under “anger ,” “#Technology # News customer ‘bewildered and fearful’ about use of their
data "is identified under “fear ,”and so on. Similar analysis of sample tweets can be seen for other
emotions (see Exhibit TN-3)
9. Comments on the polarity of tweets posted by Tech Talk

Polarity analysis is the basis for sentiment analysis (mainly referred to as opinion miming ) wherein
the attitude of the author of the content can be analysed and identified .This analysis provides useful
insights ,including identifying the major topics of discussion along with their polarity. The identified
content topics are classified as positive ,negative ,or neutral .A tweet like “good to connect with a like
–minded professional .Cheers” is classified as a polarity tweet. ON the other hand , “#Technology #
News customers ‘bewildered and fearful ’about use of their data ”is categorized as a negative polarity
tweet. A closer look at other tweets shows their corresponding polarity (see Exhibit TN-4) .

Case Exhibit 12 shows the polarity of tweets posted on Tech Talk and which major keywords fall into
the positive ,negative , and neutral categories .It is clear that there have been positive discussion
pertaining to technology and neutral discussion on business and artificial intelligence ,whereas the
news articles discussed have mainly been on the negative polarity side.
10 . What does the network of top Tech Talk followers imply ?

The network analysis mainly focuses on the metrics that can be examined based on the network
layout of a social media profile and the interaction among other connected to it. For Example ,for
twitter ,the connection can be established by followers / friends ,retweets ,and @ mentions .Case
Exhibit 14 depicts a network of top followers for Teck Talk .

IT can be seen from this network that Tech Talk is popular among many IBM groups, as well as
social media. Digital & technical profiles. Also there are small clusters within the network for users
sharing similar content like a connection between “SOCIAL MEDIA ,” “Social Media Mind ,”
“Social Media News ,” and “Social Media B2B.”Similar clusters are seen between “IBM developer
works ,” “IBM Cloud Canada ,” “The IBM MSP Team ,” “IBM Watson Commerce ,” and
“Informatica Bid Data .”Several other major followers of Tech Talk also follow “good reads ,”
another popular Tech Talk follower. Similar clusters can be seen between top followers of Tech Talk
.These network can be used for analysing tie strength ,information diffusion among users ,and
increasing information virality.
11 . How can Khare identify potential influences from among his subscriber base and engage
with them appropriately ?

Some other important social media metrics that can be used to analyse Tech Talk ‘s subscriber base
are as follows:

Multiplexity : The number of types of platforms facilitating an interaction by a group of people .It is
interpreted as an indicator of relationship strength .For Example ,two people who are friends and also
work together would have a multiplexity of 2 .

Mutuality / Reciprocity : The extent to which two actors responds to each other in an interaction.

Clustering Coefficient : A measure of the probability that two associate nodes for one user node are
connected within a graph consisting of social interactions a large base of users .A higher score in
terms of the clustering coefficient reports as greater “ Cliquishness ,”that is , some of the subscribers
form a close interactive group where everyone interacts with the other members of the clique.

Cohesion : The degree of which subscribers and followers are connected directly to each other in a
social network by bonds .Structural cohesion identifies the minimum number of members of a graph
that, if removed from a small group ,would disconnect the group from the rest of the graph.
Network analytics would bring out the potential influencers in Tech Talk's subscriber base across the
social media channels .An analysis of Tech Talk’s top followers on Twitter (in case Exhibit 14 )
illustrates a few cliques and small clusters .Network visualization helps uncover the patterns among
user interactions so that identified influencers may be engaged to draw attention from the community
of other subscribers. Approaches for network analysis (shown in case Exhibit 10 ) like centrality
analysis could bring out node-level metrics ,degree centrality (most frequent network ties ) , and
betweenness, which could prove beneficial in revealing influences in the network . Modularity
analysis may also be explored to identify interest groups and communities .If these influencers can be
identified and engaged through social media, there is a greater chance that social interactions can
result in posted content circulating rapidly .

Tech talk should engage frequently with these influences to obtain higher mind apace in the niche
domain of emerging technology discussions .Khare could also use the results of social media
analytics shown in case Exhibit 11-13 to identify other portals similar to “TechCrunch,” “Mashable ,”
“CNN ,” and “BBC ”that tend to share similar content on “technology ,” “business , ” and “News
”for retweeting on Tech Talk. Tech Talk could possibly attract more interested users from these
portals .
12 . Should Khare Manage social media marketing in -house or outsource it ? If outsourced ,what
promotion model should he use ?

Khare Wants to build a social presence for Tech Talk. The objective is not to build social presence to
get higher visibility in organic traffic, but to connect with like-minded users with whom interaction
can be continued. Therefore, advertising directly on social media websites is the only possible
approach. The question is whether Khare should do it in –house or outsource it. Since he wants to
minimize cost, such targeting should be done by the core leadership team only, since it has the best
understanding of the content type and potential targets .
 WHAT HAPPENED

Tech Talk started investing in advertisements on LinkedIn and Facebook. The technical articles,
which were more theoretically heavy, were promoted on LinkedIn. This strategy spurred the
growth of referral traffic through LinkedIn .The infographics, which had greater appeal among
Facebook users, were promoted using advertisements on Facebook. For the infographics ,a lot
sharing and bookmarking happened on image –sharing websites such as Pinterest, although
promotions were not taken up on Pinterest immediately ,but were planned for the future. As a
result of these advertisements and social shares, Tech Talk’s social presence and traffic grew
significantly ,by over 30 percent and many of the articles were shared on social media by the
subscribers of these platforms. However ,because of the limitations of in house technical capability
,Tech Talk did not try to identify influences in order to boost the virality of its content over social
media.
As a co-founder, Khare tried to decide how to promote Tech Talk and create a larger presence for
the portal on social media. Detailed analysis of social media platform metrics –including
descriptive content, and network analysis –proved beneficial in helping Khare make a decision
about which potential influencers could be used to promote content. The importance of using social
media and SEO for greater online visibility has been highlighted. Tech Talk should not outsource
social media marketing activities since niche firms cater to the needs of niche audiences, which
external marketing agencies may not be able to appreciate .
 EXHIBIT TN-1: FUNCTIONAL BLOCKS OF SOCIAL MEDIA

IDENTITY • The degree of personal information revealed

• Security and privacy control mechanisms
PRSENCE • Detect the online availability of others
• Managing availability and invisibility
• Managing intimacy and immediacy
RELATIONSHIP • How one is related (friend ,acquaintance ,relative )
• Relationship privacy
• Nature of interaction
REPUTATION • How one is aware of the social and professional background of others
• Understanding strength ,passion and reach of users
Groups • How users form like -minded communities based on interests
• Rules of membership and scope of enforcing rules

CONVERSATIONS • The extent to which users communicate with each other

• Conversation velocity ,network effects ,risks of initiating / joining a conversation
SHARING • Degree of new content creation
• The degree of sharing and exchanging content
• Content management
 EXHIBIT TN-3:EMOTION ANALYSIS OF TECH TALK TWEETS
Original Tweets Cleaned Tweets Emotion

1 @brainsparkz good to connect with a like minded professional .cheers good to connect with a like minded proffessional .cheers Joy

2 #Business pocket friendly travelling through Uber https://t.com/InEHyCSvQe business pocket friendly travelling through uber joy

#Business # news angry Justin Bieber throws down mic, storms off stage during business news angry justin bieber throws down mic storms off stage
3 Anger
concert http://t.com/z3xD50JvCV (from Mashable ) during concert from mashable
# Technology # News Newspaper Fury over Facebook ''Napalm Girl "censorship Technology news newspaper fury over facebook napalm girl
4 Anger
http://t.co/jDZkbsdpnf(from BBC) censorship from bbc
# Technology # News "Amnesia games to scare a new generation of players on technology news amnesia games to scare a new generation of
5 Fear
PS4 http://t.com/m4Uae88q6o(from Engadget ) players on ps4 from engadget
# Business # News Massachusetts cops warn public of frightening rap battles business news Massachusetts cops warn public of frightening rap
6 Fear
https://t.co/jh5RZ9JO(from Mashable ) battles from mashable

7 # Business How to create amazing infographics http: //t.com/rntLyALRsp business how to create amazing infographics Surprise

# Business # News chance the Rapper is just as stunned by Beyoncé's presence as business news chance the rapper is just as stunned by Beyoncé's
8 Surprise
we are http://t.com/mvuq7FV8U0(from Mashable ) presence as we are from mashable
# Technology # News : Privacy groups call foul on What's app sharing data with technology news privacy groups call foul on what's app sharing data
9 Disgust
Facebook http://t.com/asotTK2XZK(from EnGadget) with Facebook from engadget
# Business # News sick of Pokémon go ? Block it in chrome with these business news sick of pokemon go block it in chrome with these
10 Disgust
extensions http://t.co/1qehbGKOYU(from Mashable ) externsions from mashable
# Technology # News : Apple CEO'S tearful Orlando tribute
11 Technology news apple ceos teraful orlando tribute live from cnn Sadness
http://t.com/PBThgfPJ(live from CNN )
Indians who never followed football are sad due to Messi's retirement Indians who never followed football are sad due to messis
12 Sadness
https://t.com/Fzw0sOAT retirements
 EXHIBIT TN-4:POLARITY ANALYSIS OF TECH TALK TWEETS

Original Tweets Cleaned Tweets Polarity

@Brainsparkz good to connect with a like minded

1 good to connect with a like minded professional .cheers Positive
professional. cheers

# Buisness Pocket Friendly Traveling through Uber https:

2 business pocket friendly travelling through uber Positive
//t.co./In EHyCSvQe

#Technology # News Newspaper fury over Facebook

technology news newspaper fury over facebook napalm girl
3 ''Napalm Girl'' censorship https://t.co/jDZksdpnf (from BBC Negative
censorship from bbc
)

# Buisness # News Massachusetts cops warn public of

Buisness News Massachusetts cops warn public of
4 frightening rap battles http://t.com/j0h5RZ9Z9J0(from Negative
frightening rap battles from Mashables
Mashables )

# Buisness # news ''Hamilton's America ''trailer will only

Buisness news ''Hamilton's America ''trailer will only
5 slightly ease your 'Hamilton ''FOMO http: Neutral
slightly ease your 'Hamilton from mashable
//t.co/HyaetAPPV2 (from Mashable )

# Business # News lady gaga just announced the duet of the

Business News lady gaga just announced the duet of the
6 century and fans cannot cope Neutral
century and fans cannot cope from Mashable
http://t.co/voEVVMW2TM(from Mashable )