(928) 351-7806 EriginMarketing@gmail.com

Social Media Analytics- A Guide on What and How to Measure
Are you using the right social media analytics tools to monitor, assess and improve your social media performance?

What analytics are you measuring and what should you be measuring in your social media tracking ?

Monitoring your social media analytics can make the difference between the success or failure of your social media presence.

In this article, we outline what you need to be monitoring and outline a range of tools for social media analysis and reporting.

Download-Icon-Orange

No time to read this article now? Download the PDF versionfor future reference!

The Social Media Analytics Compass

 

The social media analytics compass contains the most essential areas that you need to monitor for your social media channels.

It’s not possible to monitor everything across every channel due to limitations of the tool and it’s not essential to monitor everything depending on the business.

From this compass pick out what’s important for your business and identify a relevant tool to provide the relevant reports.

 

Social Media Analytics Compass (from RazorSocial)

Across each social media channel, where possible, you want to measure the following. (Note: you will need to differentiate between paid and unpaid.)

  • Audience size – The size of your fans/followers does matter if you have a relevant following.  So you want to track the growth rate of your followers.  You want consistent growth on a daily basis.  That is essential.
  • Audience Profile – It’s great having lots of followers but are they relevant?  For relevancy, you want to check to see if they are the ideal type of person.  If the analytics functionality is not there to categorize your followers you may need to run surveys.
  • Reach and Engagement-  You have relevant followers and now you want to reach them by sharing valuable content.  Although measurement is useful for tracking the relevancy of your content you need to consider that impressions is also important.  An impression is where someone gets to see your content but they may or may not interact with it. There are a lot of ‘lurkers’ online that could be reading your content, they may never interact but they still may buy.  So… measure reach and engagement.
  • Traffic – You will want to generate website traffic from all your activity.  When you get that traffic you’ll want to track what were the results of that traffic.  Some publishers just want traffic because traffic equals more ad revenue.  Others want leads and sales.  Either way you’ll want to measure traffic and results from that traffic.
  • Content Analysis-  You’ll want to drill down to figure which content is popular/not popular.  We also want to make sure we are being good citizens and promoting a reasonable share of other people’s content.
  • Community Responsiveness –  When your fans interact with your updates, how quickly do you respond to them?  This is very important if it’s a customer service channel but it’s really important whatever the kind of account it is.  Delays to engagement mean less engagement.
  • Competitor Benchmarking – You’ll want to analyze your competitors and do benchmarking against yourself.  What’s working well or not working well for competitors, what can we learn from?  One area is important is share of voice.  If people are talking about your competitor more than you that’s a bad thing (unless they are saying bad things about your competitor)
  • Sentiment Analysis – Monitor your product or brand online to gauge negative or positive sentiment towards it.  Although sentiment analysis is never 100% correct it still has it’s uses.

Thanks to the following people for contributing to the social media compass:  Brian Carter, Mark Schaefer, Lilach Bullock, Dan Purvis, Martin Jones, Mark Fidelman, Steven Eisenberg, Stephan Hovnanian, Julia Bramble, Emeric Ernoult, Gregory Bailey, Beatrice Hunt,

As paid media is an increasingly important part of social media, you will need to split out what is costing you money and not costing you money and assess both.

Vanity metrics are things like follower numbers alone.  It’s just a number that sounds good so you need to back it up with analytics on type of followers.  Your sanity metrics are the ones that really matter, for example, someone going from Twitter to your website and buying a product.

Vanity metrics make you feel good but don’t do much for your business, stick to sanity ones!Click To Tweet

How to track product/service campaigns

Creating a campaign to sell a specific product or service on your website needs a special mention.

If you want to track sales from various channels, shared in various ways (e.g. post, ad, pinned post etc.), you’ll need to use unique tracking links.

For example, I’m running a conference with Mark Schaefer on Content Marketing in Dublin and we’d like to see where the sales are coming from.

This is handled through a combination of setting up goals in Google Analytics and setting up UTM tracking, which adds additional information to the links you share so they can be tracked in Google Analytics.

What type of tools can you use?

To track all the analytics, you may need to use different types of tools.

Platform analytics

There are some great analytics tools provided by each of the platforms. For example, Twitter analytics or Facebook Insights.  These tools have evolved over the years and provide some really useful functionality.

Management tool analytics

There is a wide variety of social media management providers that provide analytics as part of their solution.  As the tools continue to mature, the analytics get better!

Standalone analytics

These are social media measurement tools that only provide social media analytics functionality.  As their entire focus is analytics, you can find some great functionality as part of these platforms.  The only thing to consider is that they are accessing platform analytics so their analytics can be only as good as the data provided by the platform!

 

Tools used for Social Media Analytics

In the following we have focussed on tools that are dedicated to social media analytics.

1. Simply Measured

Simply Measured provides a very comprehensive social media reporting platform that supports a broad range of social networks.

How much will it cost you?

To give you a taste for the platform, you can start off using the free reports, which are quite useful.

To access the paid reports, pricing starts at $500 per month for 10 social profiles with an audience of up to 250k. After this the pricing is tiered e.g. $1,500 per 20 social profiles, $2,500 for 50 social profiles. If you are an agency you will need to get a quote.

What are the main features?

  • Supports – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Vine, Pinterest, Instagram, Google+, Twitter and LinkedIn
  • Wide range of standard reports are available for each platform
  • Web traffic and conversion analysis – You can connect to Google Analytics and view detailed information
  • Competitive analysis and benchmarking – Run reports against your competitors to review your performance
  • Influencer and Trend Analysis – Figure out who the key influencers are who you need to connect with and track trends
  • Brand, Keywords and Hashtag monitoring – Get email alerts based on criteria you set
  • Professional reports, all of which are available in Excel and Powerpoint
  • Multi-channel analysis so you can compare many accounts at the same time – for example, compare multiple Twitter accounts
  • Scheduled reporting – Get reports delivered to you automatically.

How does it work?

When you connect your social profiles, you have a choice of a wide range of standard reports.  On the left-hand side, select the category  you want.  For example, select Twitter if you only want to view reports that are relevant to Twitter.

As an example, when I selected the Twitter Account Report, it brings me to a screen where you can provide details of your Twitter account. You can then name this ‘collection’ and assign any tags that further describe what the report is about.

Simply measured create collection
Specify the details of the report

You then specify the type of report you want to run.  You’ll see there’s also a menu option for alerts.  This allows me to set up monitoring on this account and get alerts.

Simply Measured Alerts
Specify the alerts you want to receive

There is good configuration on the alerts, where you can set up options such as only delivering alerts based on someone having a high number of followers or Klout score.

When you run a report, you can either view it online or as an Excel report.   The reports are very visually appealing, well designed and full of great content.

If you don’t like the black background there is also a light-colored theme.

What I love most about the Excel reports is that it’s not just the graphs that are exported to Excel.  It also creates multiple sheets that contain all the data that back up the graph.

Having the data means you can analyze it even further and maybe start changing the data to predict future results.

excel reports
There are many sheets of data provided for each report

As well as social media accounts, you can also run off reports from your website.  For example, this is one of the charts in a report that shows you the Twitter users who are driving the most traffic to your site.  This is very useful to know as these are people you need to engage with more.

Traffic Report
View detailed reports on website activity as a result of social media activity

Overall Opinion

Simply Measured is a really powerful social media analytics platform that provides an extensive range of really nicely designed reports that are available either online, or through Excel and Powerpoint.

Their free reports are a great starting point and definitely worth using.

The fact they support such a broad range of social media platforms, together with their high starting price point, means that it’s really suitable for the larger brands, and they do have some very large brands already as clients.

 

2. Rival IQ

Rival IQ is a social media competitive analysis tool. You create one or more landscapes of competitors or clients and track their performance across both social media and the web.

The platform is really nicely designed and easy to understand so you’ll get benefit from it very quickly.

How much will it cost you?

Pricing starts at $199 for 15 tracked companies and up to 90 social profiles.  For $299 this goes up to 25 tracked companies and 150 social profiles, with additional functionality.

What are the main features?

  • Supports Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and Google+, Pinterest and YouTube
  • Tracks multiple markets or clients through the use of landscapes
  • Monitors social metrics across all channels supported
  • Analyzes data relevant to SEO
  • Monitors and improves on social bio information
  • Monitors the best-performing content shared by you or your competitors
  • Monitors AdWords traffic generated.

How does it work?

You connect your social profiles on Rival IQ and also add on any competitors you want to track.

You can group companies into different landscapes (e.g. partner, competitor etc).

Here’s an example of a landscape showing the most engaging tweets for companies in that landscape:

Landscape
View the most engaging content for the landscape

Your can create reports based on all this information.

I have set up a weekly report from Rival IQ, which gives detailed information on our performance across channels and against competitors.

One other area that is really useful is the alerts.  Here are alerts when people in the landscape update their profile descriptions:

alerts
Alerts

The SEO section provides some basic information related to SEO. While this is certainly not a replacement for an SEO tool, it does provide you with some valuable, high-level information.

Any of the reports can also be exported to a Powerpoint presentation, enabling you to produce some great management reports that contain nice graphs and statistics for each of your competitors.

Overall Opinion

This is a very intuitive platform with good social media analytics. I’d like to see integration with Google Analytics as it would also be great to see the traffic generated and results achieved from your social media interactions. I’d also like to see more detailed SEO analytics, for example, being able to drill down on the most popular external links from competitors. This is a nice-to-have feature as opposed to an essential feature!

A very useful platform well worth considering.

 

3. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a very comprehensive web analytics tool that most of us are familiar with to some degree, but it also provides some social media analytics that we quite often overlook and don’t spend enough time on!

How much will it cost you?

This tool is completely free.

What are the main features?

Here are some of the main features in relation to social media analytics.

  • Track traffic from social platforms – You can drill down by referrer and look at the traffic generated from each of the social platforms. If you use a custom URL, you can track traffic generated from a specific link you shared.
  • Isolate traffic using a segment – If you want to drill down on traffic for a particular channel, you can create a segment and view information just related to that channel.
  • Social media dashboard – Create a graphical dashboard that shows a summary of your social media activity and the results of traffic generated.
  • View real-time traffic – When you share out content on social media, you can view your website traffic in real-time.  While you’re not going to do this all the time, you may have an important campaign that you have want to track more closely in the early stages, and monitoring the real-time statistics can be useful.
  • Social media conversions – You can set up goals and track the conversion rates of these goals broken down by social channel.

How does it work?

Assuming you already have Google Analytics installed, the only additional set up is as follows:

Under the acquisition -> channels section of Google Analytics, you’ll be able to see traffic from each social channel and conversion of that traffic.

If you want to set up a social media analytics dashboard, here’s one provided by Koozai.

In the Acquisition > Social section, there are other social media analytics worth considering. For example, in the Data Hub section you can view the conversations related to your content that happened on various social channels.

Google Analytics Data Hub
View conversations, which can be filtered by social network

There are other areas within this section that are also worth looking at.

Overall Opinion

As well as tracking the activity on social media channels, you also need to track what happens when the traffic comes back to your website.  Google Analytics is a useful tool for this.

 

4. Zuum

Zuum is a social media analysis tool used for benchmarking performance against competitors, finding the most engaging content and identifying key influencers.

How much will it cost you?

Pricing starts at $249 per month, which gives you access to all platforms, unlimited fans and up to four competitors.

What are the main features?

  • Analytics support for Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Google+, Pinterest and Instagram
  • Compare your posting activity with your competitors and also analyze their paid posting strategy
  • Leaderboard showing your performance in comparison with your competitors
  • Discover the posts driving the highest engagement so you can determine the topics you should be writing about
  • Create a social media benchmarking report
  • Influencer report showing the most influential users, which can be sorted by likes, engagement, shares etc.
  • Integration with Google Analytics
  • Set up daily,weekly or monthly email reports.

How does it work?

When you login, the menu on the left allows you to select the social media channel and area you want to view analytics for. The initial screen shows a dashboard showing fan/follower count for each competitor across all channels supported. This leaderboard table is available for all platforms supported.

If we take Facebook as an example, this is broken down into the following:

  • Benchmarking  – See how your brand is doing in relation to your competitors – fans, engagement, share of voice, trending content, etc. Here’s an example of the share of voice section.
Share of voice
View how your brand is doing against competitors on Facebook
  • Publishing –  What content is working, when is it working, what is getting the most likes/comments/shares? Here is an example of Twitter posting volume.  The larger circles indicate when most activity occurred. This is a view for a particular brand but you can also view overall stats to show you and your competitors all on the same chart.
Twitter Posting
View an overall chart or drill down on a particular brand
  • Community – This shows you the most engaging content shared by fans, the key influencers, what the community are talking about,  the content fans are posting, etc.

For Twitter analytics, benchmarking and publishing analytics is supported but there is no option for ‘community support’ feature.  For YouTube channels, only the benchmarking analytics is supported.  For Google + and Instagram, the only supported functionality is leaderboard analytics.

Overall Opinion

Zuum provides you very good Twitter and Facebook analytics that allow to figure out what is working/not working on your accounts.  Good, detailed analytics that is very easy to use.

Currently, there is less support for YouTube, Google+ and Instagram but this is being added (I have a release that will be out next week that now has this functionality).

 

5. SoTrender

SoTrender provide analytics for Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and Twitter.  As well is providing the analytics, it gives you recommendations on how to resolve some of the issues, which is useful.

How much will it cost you?

Price starts at $15 per month and you get access to all analytics for up to 10,000 profiles for one brand. At $70 per month, you can analyze up to 100,000 profiles, you get competition tracking and can analyze three brands.  There is also a platinum and gold version.

What are the main features?

  • Support for Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and Twitter
  • Data-driven tips and recommendations – based on your analytics, you can access tips to improve the results
  • Highly customizable reports
  • Competition tracking and industry benchmarking
  • Workflow management via tasks

How does it work?

You connect your relevant social media accounts to your SoTrender account and allow it a few hours to gather data.  Then, you can start to look at your analytics in the form of charts and graphs.

Here, we see the engagements stats…

summary

And here, the days of the week on which we get the most engagement.

These can all be accessed in the left-hand menu on the page.

Which days of the week are your Facebook fans the most engaged?
Which days of the week are your Facebook fans the most engaged?

SoTrender also offers users tips to improve their social media accounts, an analysis of the types of posts you share, and a summary of your fans’ demographics.

There are some beta features, too, that look like they could be promising in the future.

Beta functionality for SoTrender
Beta functionality for SoTrender

Overall Opinion

If you want a way to look at your social media analytics in a way that is nicely presented and accessible, SoTrender is a good, affordable option.  It may not be as high performance a some, but it will give you a new perspective on your social media stats and help you to improve your performance and engagement.

 

6. Crowdbooster

Crowdbooster is an analytics tool for Facebook and Twitter. It provides analytics with recommendations on how to make improvements, including the timing of when you should send your updates. It also provides the facility to share scheduled content across the platforms.

How much will it cost you?

Prices start at $9 per month for one Facebook Page and Twitter account with up to 50,000 fans/followers, which is quite reasonable. The prices go up to $49 for 10 social media accounts and $119 for 30. Enterprise pricing is also available for bigger accounts.

What are the main features?

  • Find your best content – Analysis on what is the best content you have posted
  • Alerts and recommendations – It will track any spikes or unusual activity and also give recommendations based on the analytics collected. For example, suggestions on the best times to post
  • Automatically schedule content – You can publish content to Facebook and Twitter and let Crowdbooster automatically schedule the content
  • View the users who are interacting with you the most, e.g. comments, likes etc.
  • View analytics on each individual tweet or Facebook update.

How does it work?

When you connect up your Facebook or Twitter accounts, you immediately see data about your accounts. In the following example, you can see an overall view of Twitter activity for a week. It then shows the tweets that were most effective. The ones higher up the chart got the most impressions and the ones over to the right got the most retweets.

Crowdbooster Graph
Find out the tweets that are working for you!

Based on this report, you can then drill down and view the actual tweets. You can also see a similar graph for Facebook and, when you drill down to see the actual Facebook updates, this is what you would see.

CrowdBooster Facebook Analytics
View various filters for Facebook

You can also find your most engaged users on Twitter or Facebook.  This is useful as these are people you may want to follow and/or engage with.

Crowdbooster Engaged users
View a list of people engaging/sharing your content

You can also use Crowdbooster to post and schedule tweets for the future, under the Publish option at the top of the page.

Schedule tweets in Crowdbooster
Schedule tweets in Crowdbooster

You can also post to your Facebook Page from the Publish tab.

Overall Opinion

Crowdbooster is a well-designed application with good functionality and their tips for making improvements are useful. The only reservation I’d have is that I would prefer to use a social media analytics platform that supports all the major social networks (only Twitter/Facebook supported) or use a full social media management platform that includes a lot more functionality.

 

7. Quintly

Quintly provides analytics for Facebook, YouTube, Google+ and Twitter. The information is laid out in customizable dashboards where you can add widgets for data or stats you want to monitor. A list of standard widgets are provided.

How much will it cost you?

There’s a free option with limited Facebook analytics and then a starting price of $69 per month that includes analytics for the 4 platforms and 7 profiles (each account/page is a profile).  Further options are $199 for 20 profiles and $399 for 45 profiles.

What are the main features?

  • Analytics provided for Facebook, YouTube, Google+, Twitter and LinkedIn company pages
  • Create multiple dashboards that contain a different set of clients or customers
  • PDF reports that are nicely formatted and presented
  • Competitive analysis reporting.

How does it work?

When you add your social profiles (and those of any competitors), you are presented with a customizable dashboard with widgets containing graphs/data. You can also set up multiple dashboards.

Here is an example of the graphs.

Quintly Charts
An example of charts provided by Quintly

You can customize the dashboard according to your needs by adding/removing any widgets.

Quintly Widgets
Select from a good variety of standard widgets

Reports are available as PDF, JPG, PNG, XLS or CSV.

Overall Opinion

A nice, easy user interface is provided by Quintly and I particularly like the dashboard approach where you can customize your own widgets.  It comes in at an attractive starting price for your social media analytics.

 

Summary

As your social media presence grows, you will need to consider investing in some 3rd-party analytics tools. Ideally, you want a cross-platform tool with good competitive analysis.  The selection of social media analytics tools we have covered gives you some good options.

What is your experience with the tools?  What works best for you?

 

Image courtesy of Shutterstock

The post Social Media Analytics: A Guide on What and How to Measure appeared first on Social media and content marketing technology.

Source: Razor Social

Pin It on Pinterest

Shares
Share This