Measuring Social Media
Social media started as a gamey kind of thing, but soon became a game-changer, with brands and products embracing it to hard-sell, by word of click. It makes sense for such companies to monitor social media and gauge the results. However, measuring social media is not like regular analytics stuff, which is where many go wrong. Here's how you can get it right:
When it comes to measuring social media
Statistics does not the whole story tell. The referrals from social media may compare unfavorably with an SEM campaign, but that is not because you don't make a sale at the end of the day. It is just that in social media, the action is elsewhere and may not necessarily reflect on your site referral stats all the time.
Look out for intangible signals. For example, a feel good factor for a brand which can be perceived if you ask someone about it, thought it might not show up in the referral stats. Social media is more about perception, engagement, emotions, and less about numbers, which is why some prefer the phrase monitoring social media to measuring social media.
There are many social media monitoring tools that tell us to what extent social media is useful in spreading the butter thick, in informally providing a touch and feel of the product or the brand we are pushing through it to a larger audience.
Here's a sneak peek at some of the popular social media measuring tools:
Radian6
A tracking tool that gives insights into your brands performance on various social media channels, blogs, Twitter and Face book, with the help of detailed analytics reports and charts.
Alterian
Provides advanced user behavior statistics, measures and analyze daily volume, demographics, location, positive or negative content tone, themes, and trending topics for your brand/product.
ScoutLabs
Web-based tool with an interface like Google Analytics, it tracks almost all the online social media channels, measures all the negative/positive signals and delivers reports based on the overall performances.
Real Time Self Service
Self-service analytics software supports both qualitative and quantitative research, provides automated semantic analytics to allow you to explore insights and opinions about your products and brands on social media, and claims the platform automatically captures large, relevant data sets through topic categorization.
Social Mention
Tracks all the brand mentions on any particular channel like blog/micro blogs and gives you a comprehensive idea of how the brand is perceived by users, viz. positive, negative or neutral.
Brands Eye
Picks up signals from social media mentions and puts them in a different perspective and gives details about reputation, media origin and sentiments associated to a brand.
Trendrr Real Time
A very web 3.0 kind app that does real time digital/social media monitoring for you, sources blogs, microblogs, search, social networks and even video, for your brand mentions and crunches them into numbers.
Spark
Spark is high-end analytics with a visual interface, easy to interpret and compare. Its USP: Claims that its data source is not merely limited to RSS feeds, but combines proprietary crawler technology with public search engines, and so captures a wider breadth of data, is more detailed, has less span and more relevant results.
MAP
This focuses on the core concepts of social media listen > measure > understand and engage, and provides real-time intelligence to manage products, brands and reputations on social media.
Attentio
Collects data from all social media channels related to brands and products, assimilates and studies them to give structured data, in multi-lingual applications, with more of a brand-centric focus.
DNA 13
This tool is rich with insights on how and why a brand is performing well/bad on the media channels, provides TV, print, online news, social media, and RSS feeds, all under a single umbrella.
How to create an awesome Twitter profile in Google Analytics
http://econsultancy.com/blog/3858-how-to-create-an-awesome-twitter-profile-in-google-analytics
http://mindsproutmarketing.com/blog/2010/05/how-to-add-google-analytics-to-your-facebook-page/
