The need people have for social media analytics is becoming more and more pressing, as social media provides more and more marketing opportunities as a way for online users to pass their time. Nowadays, by utilizing reporting tools available online, internet marketers can continue shaping the social media strategy and also the overall interaction methods. In what concerns the most important metrics meant to be tracked when it comes to social media, these include the well-known ROI which is able to determine time spent on social networks like Twitter and Facebook can translate into revenues for these companies.
Success is relative in social media analytics
However, the most important thing that should be remembered about social media analytics is that the so-called ‘success’ is relative to the brand of the page which is being measured. By comparing a small business page to one which is nationwide, you’ll always get disappointing results, as this is an impossible achievement. Nevertheless, when it comes to tracking page metrics, not the big businesses are the ones which do the work. For instance, Facebook makes it very easy to track down these page metrics by sending a list of statistics to administrators each week, in which they include the growth in fans compared to previous weeks and the traffic to their page. These are then calculated into month averages in order for the growth in traffic and overall interaction to be reported. Moreover, Facebook is also able to report insights on each post made by page administrators, and also new graphs that display the user’s gender and his age range. These can be useful demographics which companies can easily use, even if they have a strict audience target.
Twitter and its new analytics platform
Concerning social media analytics, Twitter has just come up with a new analytics platform that allows all users to track down follows, overall traffic, un-follows and clicks, as well. This analytic service is different from the one Facebook has, as in addition to other similar metrics, this service is able to track down clicks, too. As Twitter is used most of all as a link-sharing service, tracking links is among the most valuable analytics it has. While this can be completed by using outside services, it has the ability of accessing data directly on the Twitter platform, by making it more accurately, more reliable and in the same time more convenient.
Great tools for social media analytics to consider
Besides these two main social media analytics, there are also several others that are able to track links and also mentions of different company products or names from the social media. Some great tools that can be used this way are Tweet-Deck, Bit.ly, Social Mention and TwitterFeed. Together with UTM tags, these allow you to track down clients from only an RSS feed published on Twitter some time ago. The posted links can also be tracked down in Google Analytics. This can help calculate the ROI, especially if links posted on Facebook or Twitter with UTMs tags are taking users to lading pages. The process can be simplified by using a shorter link for the UTM and URL tags, as this way it’s easier to write link URLs.
