Social media marketing has become an essential piece of any comprehensive promotional strategy. Businesses of all sizes have come to understand the importance of building a community via branded messaging on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, FourSquare, and other social sharing networks.
The best social media marketing programs are built on well-planned community management and content strategies that focus on audience engagement and brand awareness in an attempt to deliver better ROI. It’s also important to audit what’s being said by customers, competitors and third-party observers in order to identify strengths, respond to weaknesses, and predict future behaviors.
Fortunately, dozens of tools are available to help analyze and measure your company’s social media performance in real time. Knowing which tools to leverage depends on what you are trying to accomplish. There are sophisticated options that offer highly customized reporting across multiple social media platforms, as well as bare-bones programs that provide a lower level of functionality. Some tools will provide metrics and publish content, as well as track click-thrus and conversions from your posts.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is one of the most used, well-known tools available, with a full suite of applications to track and measure your social media and web activity. It’s a highly interactive system that allows you to set specific reporting goals, based on the metrics that are most important to you.
The “Social Reports” function provides a holistic view of conversions, community engagement, and content. This will help you determine where you are getting the most social activity and which platforms may need additional attention to perform better. Google Analytics also offers a premium upgrade for organizations with especially complex reporting needs.
Free Measurement Tools
The importance of social media marketing metrics has spawned a proliferation of free tools, with some that offer paid upgrades for heavy users. A sampling of these free measurement tools includes:
BackTweets
This tool lets you track who’s talking about you and what they’re saying via searchable Twitter archives.
Buffer
You can use this app to help manage multiple social media accounts on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. This includes creating schedules for content updates to each account.
Facebook Insights
Facebook offers this free measurement tool to page owners who want to analyze demographic and growth trends among users.
HootSuite
Choose this team collaboration system for managing and executing multiple social media marketing campaigns from a single dashboard that simplifies workflow and reporting.
LikeAlyzer
You’ll like this basic Facebook analytics tool that delivers daily statistical updates, measures the effectiveness of your page on a scale of 0 to 100, and provides recommendations for strategic improvements.
Mention.net
You can use this tool to monitor the mentions of chosen keywords (such as your company name, products, or people) in real-time. It will report mentions on Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and forums.
Social Mention
Try this app for searching and analyzing aggregated user-generated content from Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google, and other social streams.
Better Metrics
If your social media marketing efforts aren’t achieving your objectives, you may be falling prey to some common mistakes that are often overlooked in the rush to create a social presence. This can be as simple as ensuring there is an easy-to-find link to your website on all of your pages and any posts where you want to see good conversion numbers.
Another problem marketers run into is trying to be on every social network at once. Using analytical tools to determine where your traffic is coming from can help you isolate and focus your efforts on the best performing channels.
However, the single most important strategy for improving your social metrics comes in the form of content. Marketing among social channels requires a consistent flow of fresh content that is relevant to your audience. Be sure that your posts and tweets reflect what is unique to your brand, why it matters to others, and what actions they should take in response.
Laura Mingo writes about topics of interest to higher education students. In particular, she covers IT careers and new technology as well as the latest trends driving the IT industry. Her aim is to empower university students in pursuit of an online masters computer information systems.
Co-written by Addy Reeds
Sources:
http://www.google.com/analytics/features/social-conversions.html
http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/social-media-tools-to-simplify-your-social-media-marketing/
http://socialmediatoday.com/node/1458746
http://socialmediatoday.com/node/1626431
http://www.inc.com/allison-fass/dave-kerpen-social-media-moves-that-work.html#/allison-fass/dave-kerpen-social-media-moves-that-work.html
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