Every week seems to teach me new things about social media. This week, we continue on the trail of monitoring and measuring. One of the most challenging tasks in social media measurement is defining the return of investment (ROI). In order to define our ROI, we must first measure – but how? How do you know if anyone is listening to what you have to say on your social media platforms? You design a strategy, you post specific, relevant content, and you watch… You want to monitor your efforts and measure your results. What is and isn’t working, why or why not? Monitoring is listening; measuring is is counting, calculating and quantifying those activities.
“Taking the Mystery Out of Monitoring and Measurement” is this weeks assignment and that is exactly what it was for me – a mystery! After finishing all the readings for this week, I was overwhelmed with the amount of measuring and analytic tools available for social media platforms. Yes, I had heard of a couple of them, but mostly not. So I figured, my three free measurement tools I would describe, would be the ones that I had heard of, but didn’t know much about, along with one paid analytic tool.
#1 Free – Hootsuite:
– covers multiple social networks including: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, WordPress, Foursquare and Google+
– is a good all around tool to use for management and metrics tracking
– a social media management for any organization
– schedule messages
– engage your audiences
– measure ROI right from the dashboard
– prove your social ROI with real-time insights and powerful social intelligence
#2 Free – Facebook Insights:
– dashboard gives you all of the analytics for your Facebook page
– allows you to understand your audience, what they are reacting to
– allows you to adjust your content to meet their needs
– each week you will see a seven day review of the most engaging activity on your page
– shows how your fan base is growing
– compares the performances of your posts
– stats you can see such as daily and monthly active users; daily new likes
– shows daily interactions such as comments and geographic locations
– when you have spikes of user engagement, insights will show you caused them; what content most interests your readers and analyze growth trends
#3 Free – Google Analytics:
– powerful and easy to use
– What posts interest readers enough to click through?
– you can set up links for campaign with specific words to track your campaign
– designed to track traffic and referral data
– help you better understand your audiences and monitor traffic to your website from all your social media channels
– great insights into your marketing effectiveness
– you can also add Google Analytics to your Facebook page
Paid – Simply Measured:
– provides a very comprehensive social media reporting platform that supports Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Vine, Pinterest, Instagram, Google+ and LinkedIn
– cost starts at $500 per month for 10 social profiles with audience’s up to 250K
– web traffic and conversion
– competitive analysis and benchmarking
– Influencer and trend analysis – learning your key influencers
– brand, keywords and Hashtag monitoring
– email alerts are also available
– scheduled reporting through online, excel or Powerpoint
All of the above reasons, for each measuring tool, whether free or paid, gives value to measuring a social web program. Without these measuring tools, we can’t answer the important questions of who, what, where, why or why not, relating to your audience and content. Having the data means you can analyze it even further and maybe start changing the data to predict future results – successful results!
My First Blog!! 