At Socialtyze, we’re constantly collecting information about everything we do. Whether it’s how well specific types of content perform on social or the various kinds of traffic our social applications receive; if it’s trackable, our data analysts are keeping an eye on it. All of this objective data helps us make smart decisions and adapt quickly to the ever-changing social spaces our clients live in. But this information is useless without understanding context. Just looking at the raw numbers doesn’t help anybody understand what’s going on. This is where data visualization becomes extremely important, by pulling together correlations and displaying the raw numbers in a way that’s easy to digest.

Understand the Questions

The first step in making sense of all this data is to know what problem we’re trying to solve. This helps our analysts figure out which pieces of data need to be looked at more closely to find insights. Even a general idea of what needs to be found helps, and will reveal interesting insights you might not have anticipated.

Find Correlations

When digging into a data set, our analysts are looking for different metrics that might be driving others one way or another. This could be anything from growth-over-time, information on demographics, or types of content. The problem you’re trying to solve will help you understand which information is good to compare.

Why Visualization is Important

Take the image above for example. Brand X is running a short sweepstakes, and we’d like to know what their visitors over time looked like. We’d also like to know how many of those visitors also entered the sweepstakes. Since this information is directly related, it makes sense to compare them. By visualizing this information, we find our first lead to an insight; the large spikes. If we were looking at just numbers written out in an excel sheet, the impact of that sudden spike in traffic is lost. Data Visualization helps us (and readers) quickly and efficiently see what’s happening.

Follow the Trail

Seeing those huge spikes helps our analysts recognize a deeper insight is just around the corner. Why was there a sudden spike? What outside activity drove that traffic to nearly triple? It just so happened that we were running media for that week, which helped drive that spike in traffic and steady increase in sweepstakes entries.

Continue the Story

Effective data visualization is telling the campaign's story; both big and small picture. If we look at the same chart as one piece of the story, it tells us that for this campaign, media spend drove traffic and entries. But this is just one part of the story. The next logical piece of information to present would be why did that media spend work. The next step is to look at more detailed information on the performance of that media spend. Understanding what did and didn’t work here will help improve performance during the next media spend. Our media team often runs multiple ads with the same goal. They’ll be different enough from each other (while maintaining the larger strategies) that we’re able to learn tactics to optimize content. Often we’ll find subtle things like darker images performing better than bright ones. It’s a simple discovery, but it helps us to make our next push even stronger than the last.

Maintain Clarity Throughout the Story

While comparing information, avoid presenting too much all at once. An image may be worth a thousand words, but don’t pack a thousand things into it. Use each visualization to say 1 thing with only a few sets of data. Then build on that information as you present each new visualization to tell the bigger story. Treat your overall presentation like one of those 5-Paragraph essays drilled into your head back in high school.• Present a thesis to frame your argument• Provide clear supporting facts to defend that argument• Conclude by reiterating the key-takeawaysBy the end, your reader should have a clear understanding of how the data we find translates to making gains towards their larger goals.Want more tips and tricks for how to dominate social this year with Data, Creative and Amplification? Download our 2016 Social Media Survival Guide.