In the Headlights, March 10, 2021: Title Case in Social Posts, Becoming Data Driven, GA4 Easy Wins - Trust Insights Marketing Analytics Consulting

Title Case in Social Posts, Becoming Data Driven, GA4 Easy Wins

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The First Step To Being Data-Driven

Yesterday, I was checking out a discussion thread in Slack (you’ve joined our free community, Analytics for Marketers, yes?) and someone asked the question, does using Title Case (every word capitalized) in social media captions garner more engagement than someone using Sentence case (first word capitalized)?

That’s a fascinating question, and certainly one that is knowable, that is answerable. But the question itself is what got me thinking. This person, Diana, was curious about something, and asked a question that needed data and analysis.

When we talk about organizations being data-driven or not being data-driven, very often we’re talking about how data is used in the decision-making process. If data is what you go to first, you’re data-driven. If something else is used first in the decision-making process (opinion, experience, intuition, emotion), then at best you’re data-informed but probably just not using data to make decisions.

Diana’s question matters so much not because we’re making a decision with data, but because she’s asking about data at the start of the process, rather than the end. When you build a culture of being data-driven, you start using data from the beginning of the project you’re working on, not as an add-on later in the process.

So what’s the secret here? It’s a core attribute you have to find and encourage in people: curiosity.

Incurious people and organizations tend not to be data-driven. They have an answer in mind, they have an outcome in mind, and they have absolutely no curiosity, no desire to dig deeper or to know more. They have a destination they’re driving to, a way they prefer to go, and nothing will sway them from it.

Curious organizations and people begin with questions they really want to know the answer to, and are willing to do the work necessary to get the answers. Unsurprisingly, once they have the answers – extracted from data and analysis – they’ll use the answers to make decisions. They too have a destination, but they use data to get to that destination in the most efficient and effective ways – and are willing to change when the data changes.

The challenge for all of us is to foster curiosity. It’s all too easy, every day, to just want to plow through the to-do list, check things off, and be as productive as possible. Our organizations demand that of us, so if we do not explicitly allocate time and resources for curiosity, we’ll never get to it.

How do you foster it? One simple trick that Katie did when she managed a team of 10 marketing technologists at an agency (agencies aren’t known for encouraging a lot of formal professional development) was to require every team member to present once a month at an all-team meeting; each week, 2 people would present on something they researched and learned to the rest of the team. At the beginning of the month, we’d ask people what questions they got from clients or other people at the company, and build a training calendar around those questions. Then individual team members would go off, do their research, and present their findings.

Fostering curiosity is all about giving people the time and space they need to be curious, and encouraging it as part of your workflow. Done well, it satisfies professional development and training needs, opens up new business opportunities, and builds the foundation you need to be truly data-driven.

Oh, and Diana’s question? We’ll answer it below in the Rear View Mirror.

In this week’s In-Ear Insights, Katie and Chris discuss some of the silly questions interviewers had asked female guests on podcasts, especially questions related to gender and race. Learn how to ask better questions of guests, and as a guest on someone else’s podcast, how to set appropriate boundaries and even provide guidance to the interviewer in advance.

Watch/listen to this episode of In-Ear Insights here »

On last week’s So What? The Marketing Analytics and Insights Live show, we talked about influencer identification and the different methods and techniques available to us for finding actually influential people.

Catch last week’s episode replay here »

Coming up on this week’s episode on Thursday at 1 PM Eastern, we’ll be tackling 3 easy wins in Google Analytics 4 you can use to get more comfortable with it.

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In this week’s Rear View Mirror, we’ll answer Diana’s question. What effect does Title Case have on engagement of Instagram posts?

To answer this question, we have to do a few things. First, we need to import captions/descriptions from Instagram, then identify which posts use which case. In many coding languages, you can filter and sort things by case using a technique called regular expressions, so we identified and separated out posts that were all caps (which there were quite a few, some folks really love the caps lock key), posts that were Title Case, and posts that were Sentence case or no case at all.

What did we find?

For posts which use Title Case, after controlling for account size and similar caption lengths, we see 94% more likes, 137% more views, and 144% more comments than posts which do not use Title Case.

Now, does that mean we should all run out and switch everything to Title Case? Of course not. What we have here is an association, but absolutely no causation. This only demonstrates that there IS a difference between the two.

So what’s the key takeaway? There’s some kind of association between case usage and post engagement. Your next step is to run tests of your own; this is an aggregate of thousands of Instagram accounts. It does not reflect your audience’s specific behavior and interests, so run some tests of your own. Try different cases to see how engagement changes, if at all, in your own social posting.

Methodology: Trust Insights used Facebook’s Crowdtangle software to extract 4,221,821 posts from 7,651 brands. Captions were counted by cases, separated, and then sampled into 25,000 Title Case captions and 25,000 non-Title Case captions. The dates of extraction are January 1, 2020 – February 16, 2021. The date of study is March 10, 2021. Trust Insights is the sole sponsor of the study and neither gave nor received compensation for data used, beyond applicable service fees to software vendors, and declares no competing interests.

Do you want to understand data science better as a marketer? Would you like to learn whether it’s the right choice for your career? Do you need to know how to manage data science employees and vendors? Take the Data Science 101 workshop from Trust Insights.

In this 90-minute on-demand workshop, learn what data science is, why it matters to marketers, and how to embark on your marketing data science journey. You’ll learn:

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