Are you ready to launch into social media marketing on platforms that draw hundreds of thousands of users each day? Perhaps you’ve already jumped in and are now wondering how you’re going to track success.
There are several questions to consider as you set up analytics to monitor the growth of your business.
Who will monitor data?
Depending on the size of the business, owners may or may not be able to dedicate an employee solely to monitor and analyze social media marketing data. Larger businesses may have the capacity to hire an analyst to respond to consumer feedback. Smaller ones, with limited resources, may need to outsource the task to a social media management company.
What data will be monitored?
Business owners have to determine which outcomes they want to measure, based on their company objectives. These key performance indicators will be used to determine whether social media marketing is effective or not. Some commonly tracked data includes:
- Engagement – This can be measured through monitoring Twitter re-tweets, comments, and bounce rates. The more engaged customers are, the more likely they will purchase something or recommend the website to their friends.
- Reach – This can be measured through monitoring the number of followers, fans, or friends. If a subscription is required for people to read your company’s blog, reach can also be measured through monitoring the number of subscribers.
- Sales Conversions – This can be measured through monitoring social media referral traffic that results in sales.
- Sentiment – This can be measured through monitoring the number of positive and negative mentions.
- The Competition – This can be measured through monitoring the number of times competitors are mentioned in customer comments and dialogue.
What is your budget?
The more you want to monitor, the more expensive it is going to be. It is best to determine the key essentials and only monitoring a small number. Aligning monitored data to company objectives, as mentioned before, is the key. This keeps the company’s actions data-driven, responding to customers needs. Once your budget is determined, you will be able to figure out how much data you can afford to monitor.
Which monitoring platform will you adopt?
It is important to consider the right platform to use for the data you are monitoring. There is comprehensive analytical software such as Google Analytics, as well as programs analyzing just one specific factor. For instance, the Klout Score measures influence. If it is important for the company to monitor re-tweets, TwitSprout is the platform to use. It is wise to conduct research on all the options available and select the services that most align with the company’s targeted data.
With increased numbers of people accessing businesses on their mobile devices, researching product information or purchasing services, it is vital for companies of all sizes to consider monitoring their social media success. The data collected can help drive changes that will make the shopping experience even better for loyal and new customers alike.
Image Credit freedigitalphotos.net
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Written By Pamela Ramos
Pamela Ramos is a website marketing consultant. She gets to share her insights through blogging on various marketing blogs. See how Yodle customers have benefited, click on the link for more ideas..[/box]
Regardless of your social media montioring platform, all the search engines, especially Google with the execution of Penguin 2.0 algorithm update want all the webmasters to generate natural, obvious online participation. Yes, these monitoring tools are very much important nowadays to track what your peers as well as competitors are upto but then they aren’t the sole factor for your online success. There are a number of things that the above article wanted to stress and some of them are well-optimized mobile website, mimimal website upload time, better and more unique content that is fully relevant, etc to gain actual and fruitful ROI in relation to your own SEO strategy.
Great post!. Social media is voluminous. Conversations are happening across many channels and social networks all over the world. To make matters even more complicated, the signal-to-noise ratio is not in our favor. This is why our monitoring must be intelligent and actionable. We should be triaging all the social media messages that come across our field of vision, so that we can focus on what’s most important. If we work in a large, matrixed organization, we need to separate by product or brand and type of message.
Rate of Interest is the best measure for Social Media success, It is the measure to calculate how much profit you are getting out of Social Media.
Very helpful post. Monitoring one’s social media’s status is indeed very important especially with the updates consistently done by Google. It is important that you are also meeting the guidelines set by Google.
Monitoring social media marketing may be an exhaustive process but it must be done to be able to track its progress and modify strategies if needed. Success means getting you expected results and having something that is measured.
Outstanding article! Social media monitoring is so essential for online success for business. It’s a lot of data to look at and can be overwhelming sometimes but using the right tools makes all the difference.