Insights Release: July 2021 - Social Media Dashboards - LFX Tools

As someone who is key to driving your open source community’s technical direction, governance, and steering, how do you measure and understand engagement with your project contributors on Social Media? Which topics being discussed on these networks have the most impact or influence on your project’s development and overall adoption?

LFX Insights now supports Twitter, the most popular social media channel for many open source project communities. Keep reading to learn more about this release and how to make the most of the new Social Media Dashboards, and gain a better understanding of your project’s ecosystem and identify opportunities for deeper engagement with key contributors and trending topics in your industry.

Release Highlights:

Social Media Metrics Dashboards: Six new Social Media Metrics Dashboards provide high-level insights into a project’s social media engagement and ecosystem, including content performance, trending hashtags, and top contributors.
New Data Source – Twitter: This release includes Twitter support for channel- and post-level metric and hashtag search functionality. Additional social media channels coming soon.

Cutting Through the Noise

Does your project use Twitter to share updates and engage with your community? If so, how do you keep track of all the conversations happening out there–about your project and the greater open source world at large?

The social media space can get noisy, with more than 1M Twitter users following and engaging with #opensource content in just the past seven days, according to real-time hashtag tracker BrandMentions. And without deeper insights, how could you tap into the fact that #devops and #AI or #artificialintelligence are the top-trending hashtags for Kubernetes this week? Tracking these and more social media insights open new opportunities for relevant and timely engagement with your communities. But how to access these insights?

More than 1M Twitter users are following and engaging with #opensource content in just the past 7 days.
— BrandMentions

Built for Open Source Projects

There are a number of paid tools out there, such as Sprinklr and Sprout Social, but most of these are designed for large-scale enterprises. These platforms tend to be costly, often requiring complex set-up to get started. Those that do offer small business options still charge per user for access, a cost that can add up for an open source project with a large pool of project maintainers and community managers needing access. This just doesn’t cut it for most open source projects, who see the value of social media insights to help drive community engagement, but may not have the large marketing budgets required to purchase these traditional tools.

We launched Ecosystem Trends Earned Media Dashboards earlier this year to help fill this need for project community teams, as part of a greater vision to provide a complete picture of your project’s ecosystem. This is provided through LFX Insights for all projects hosted by the Linux Foundation, and everyone who is a contributor or supporting member of that project has access free of charge.

This vision is one step closer to being realized, with Twitter support and Social Media Metrics Dashboards. While Ecosystem Trends provide a high-level overview of your broader community, these six new dashboards give you a deeper understanding of what’s happening and where to engage. Here’s a quick description of each of them.

High-level View: Overview Dashboard

Monitor the overall health and performance of your project’s Twitter accounts and trending keywords on the Overview Dashboard. This dashboard provides a high-level overview of the project’s channel-level performance, including follower metrics, post summary, and a breakdown of top hashtags.

Overview Dashboard Metrics Include:

Twitter Insights: Get a top-level glimpse of how well you’re performing on social media with key metrics related to your project’s Twitter accounts.
Tweets Summary: See what’s been published by your project’s Twitter account for a given time period, and how well each piece of content is performing.
Hashtags Summary: Hashtags are an important indicator of what topics are trending for your project community. See the top ones used in your posts and related conversations (i.e., retweets).
Links (URLs) Summary: Understand where you’re sending your Twitter followers most often by tracking the performance of the links you share, including which are clicked on.
Languages Summary: Get to know the breakdown of your global audience by tracking the languages they use the most in conversation with your project’s Twitter account.
Contributors Summary: Who are your top engagers on Twitter? Understanding who is most engaged with your project’s account can help you turn followers into advocates.

Content Performance: Tweets, Links (URLs), and Languages Dashboards

Dive into these dashboards for a deeper understanding of how your social media content is performing. Identify which posts are most popular on the Tweets Dashboard, or identify the top languages used by your community on the Languages Dashboard. The Links (URLs) Dashboard is especially useful for keeping track of content engagement.

Tweets Dashboard Metrics:

Tweets: This table ranks all of your Twitter content in a given time period by potential impressions, giving you a great understanding of which posts have been the most successful at reaching your community.
Tweet Breakdown: Understand how engaged your community is with your content with this colored bar graph showing tweets and retweets on a periodic basis.
Likes Over Time: See how well-liked your content is overall with this bar graph that represents the number of likes received on your tweets over time.
Retweets Over Time: Track how often your community is resharing your posts with this simple line graph that represents the number of retweets over time.
Tweet Frequency: Measure how much content you post on Twitter with this shaded line graph that depicts the total number of tweets posted by your project’s account over time.

Links (URLs) Dashboard Metrics:

Links (URL) Summary: View the links that you’ve shared in your Twitter posts for a given time period, ranked by potential impressions. This table includes links to the URLs, total number of contributors who tweeted or retweeted the URL, along with the number of tweets and retweets by contributors in the time range.
Top URLs by Tweets: Get a quick breakdown of the top-performing URLs you’ve shared, ranked by the number of times they’re mentioned over a period of time.

Languages Dashboard Metrics:

Languages Used: Understand which languages you and your community are using to engage on social media. This table ranks languages used across published tweets and (i.e., retweets), ordered by the number of tweets.
Top Languages by Tweets: Get a quick view of the most-used languages over a given time period with this curved line graph.

Track the hashtags that are relevant to your project community and identify new trending topics to engage with. This dashboard provides an overview of hashtag usage and performance across the project’s Twitter posts and related conversations (i.e., retweets).

Hashtags Dashboard Metrics:

Hashtags Used: Understand what topics are trending in your project’s Twitter posts and conversations. This table lists top trending hashtags ordered by highest potential impressions.
Top Hashtags: Use this hashtag word cloud to quickly see the topics most associated with your project’s Twitter posts and conversations.
Top Hashtags Breakdown: Get a feel for the volume of conversations around your top hashtags with this pie chart that gives you a breakdown by percentage and number of times the hashtag is mentioned in tweets and retweets.

Tap Into Your Community: Contributors Dashboard

One of the most powerful tools for any open source project is your community. Turn followers into advocates by engaging with your community and showing your appreciation to top contributors. This dashboard provides an overview of social media users (i,e., contributors or influencers) who have engaged with the project’s Twitter posts or mentioned their account. An engagement can be a like, comment, or retweet.

Contributors Dashboard Metrics:

Contributors List: Identify your most engaged contributors so you can turn them into your advocates. This table lists the Twitter handles that have engaged most with your content, ordered by the most number of potential impressions for the tweets and retweets by that user.
User Mentions: Who from your project community are you showing love to? Who might you be missing? Use this table to monitor which Twitter handles are mentioned most often in your tweets within a selected time range.

Make the Most of LFX Insights – Connect Your Twitter Account

Make the most of LFX Insights and nurture deeper engagement with your project community on social media. All projects hosted by the Linux Foundation can take advantage of these new Social Media Dashboards. We’ll be working closely with project teams over the next few weeks to connect their Twitter accounts and capture key search terms and hashtags to track. So if you don’t yet see Twitter data for your project on Insights, know that it’s coming soon.

*Social Media Dashboards with no data source configured*

If you’re in charge of social media for your project, simply reach out to connect Twitter as a data source for your project.

Request Twitter Setup