Social analytics
The traffic a tweet or a post receives can give an indication of the content's success and engagement using simple tools including:
More sophisticated tools (which are not free) are also available to deliver even more data about how your social media presence is performing.
One of the most useful and interesting measurements your business can make across social networks is how influential your material is. Influence for businesses and brands is critical to understand, as this often translates into click-throughs and then conversions to a sale. Tools to assess here include:
Closely associated with influence is sentiment. Tracking and understanding the conversations that take place around your business and the social media content you create is vital to developing a clear understanding of your customer base.
What's more, these tools enable you to locate individuals that are your brand advocates offering more opportunities to reinforce those relationships and generate even more positive sentiment.
Of course these tools also allow your business to track negative sentiment as well, and defuse any customer service issues before they become a major issue and hurt your business. Tools in this category include:
Deciding on which metrics are important for your company will guide you to the right tool (or tools) to deliver the insights you need. The social media metrics that can be measured are many, with most enterprises using a suite of tools to help them understand how effective – or not – their social media efforts have been.
Actionable insight
The mistake that is often made by businesses is to begin their social media campaign with no clear goal, or no measure of whether any goal set has been achieved.
It is also possible to use metrics to reveal the outcome of specific actions. Your business has a number of channels it uses to reach its customers. Assigning a metric to each will quickly show you which channels (including social media) are the most effective.
Here try and focus your attention on a specific goal. Perhaps you want to drive traffic to a specific product page. You can use Google Analytics to track that activity. Conversions on the page will then show you whether your campaign actually delivered the return you hoped for. Similarly, you can track any CTA (Calls to Action) you have embedded in your social media posts or emails. Use Google's freeURL builder to generate the tracking codes you will need.
It is then possible to add a value to the analysis you are conducting. One way is to use a tool like theLifetime Value Calculator that will enable you to gain an insight into the actual value of a conversion or customer activity.
Marketing Landscape advises: "The key to success is to marry social media marketing to social analytics. Social analytics informs the social media message and content
"The marketing professional is better able to create compelling content and generate messages that are more likely to amplify naturally. It also gives marketing professionals the opportunity to measure the efficacy of the messages and fine-tune them to better meet their objectives."
Social media has in the past been something of an intangible element of business marketing. Today it is possible to track, measure and analyse every aspect of your business' social media activities.
