Social Media Analytics – what to look for?
1. Traffic & Conversions from social media sites
The source and amount of traffic generated by social media is one of the easiest metrics to measure. Analytics packages allow you to filter by traffic sources, so you can see how many users come from which social media sites. You can also see whether or not that traffic goes on to convert – e.g. purchasing something, signing up for a newsletter etc.
2. Fan or follower numbers
Most social media sites will only track the total number of fans or followers you have, so you will need a third-party tool to track when people have joined or left.
3. Conversation participation
Conversation participation metrics attempt to quantify how people are interacting with your social media campaigns. These metrics will largely include things like comments or likes on a Facebook post or responding to a tweet.
4. Social reach performance
This looks at whether or not people are sharing your content by retweeting or writing a blog post about your social media campaign.
What tools to use?
Mentions can be monitored using Google Alerts, which sends you an email when it finds a mention of whatever keywords you would like to track. You can then see the sentiment of the blog posts and respond accordingly – whether it’s to thank a positive writer, attempt to reach out to someone who feels negatively about your brand or ignore someone who is being unreasonable.
Traffic can be monitored with your analytics package, like Google Analytics, which is completely free and about as comprehensive an analytics package as you need. It can track where traffic comes from, what it goes on to do and changes over time.
Twitter:
- conversation participation
- social reach
- followers
- traffic driven to your site
Facebook (Facebook has created their own analytics centre called Facebook Insights):
- fans
- reach
- people who are talking about you
- traffic
LinkedIn:
- page views
- followers
- connections
- top keywords
- traffic
Google+
- followers
- “+1s” of content
- traffic
