Internet marketers already familiar with search engine optimization and pay per click marketing know the importance of analytics, metrics, key performance indicators, and so on. Analytics can (and should) play an important role in your social media marketing strategy. If you’re not setting goals, tracking metrics, and analyzing performance, how can you tell if you’re succeeding?
Setting Social Media Goals
I find it useful to break down social media goals into discrete components. First, identify your bottom line goal, whether that is sales, cost savings, brand awareness, or some other goal.
Then, work backwards from your end goal to identify intermediate steps to achieving that goal, such as increasing web site traffic, newsletter sign ups, quote requests, or qualified leads. Repeat as many steps as you find logical or necessary. The step preceding increased traffic, sign ups, and leads could be achieving a certain level of social media engagement: views, posts, feedback, RTs, mentions, replies, and so on.
From Goals to Metrics
Once you’ve established your goals, you can identify corresponding metrics to track. In the scenario explored above, your goal / metric pairings could look something like this:
Social Media Presence: Number of Facebook “Likes”, Twitter Followers, LinkedIn group members, etc.
Social Media Engagement: Number of views, feedback, comments, posts, RTs, @ mentions, @ replies
Qualified Leads: Number of new leads from social media and web channels
Sales / Revenue: Dollar increase in sales, revenue, and profit
Analytics Tools for Social Media
While there are all sorts of tools for tracking your social media accounts, it can be difficult to get an overall picture of the effectiveness of your social media strategy without combining information from multiple tools and sources. Remember, although your bottom line goal may be sales, revenue, or profit, there are many milestones along the path to that goal.
Following are some tools to help you track progress and trends as part of your social media strategy.
Klout
Klout is one of the top tools for measuring social media influence. With the recent addition of analyzing Facebook as well as Twitter data, Klout lets you look at a variety of data about your social network presence in one spot, including trend data. The free version allows you to refresh your information every six days.
Twitalyzer
A Twitter-specific tool, Twitalyzer analyzes your Twitter presence and network to present you with a wealth of information, including your impact, engagement, influence, retweet and mention ratios, and much more. Twitalyzer also provides trend data, and comparisons and contexts, so you can see how you fit in in the Twitterverse.
Facebook Insights
Insights is Facebook’s basic analytics tool that accompanies pages. Data includes information on monthly active users, activity, media consumption, and interaction.
Google URL Builder and Analytics
Hopefully, your website already has Google Analytics on it. Analytics lets you track where your web visitors are coming from, how long they are staying on your site, and what they’re looking at. Combining Analytics with the URL Builder tool (link: http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?answer=55578&hl=en) and referrer data, you can determine how many visitors to your site are coming from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social networks. See how long these visitors stay on your site vs. other sources and how well they convert.
Constantly Monitor and Adapt Your Social Media Strategy
Social media is not a “set it and forget it” platform. Your user base, their habits, and their preferences are constantly changing. What works for you today may not work tomorrow. That’s why you need to continuously monitor your social media profiles and the traffic they refer to your website. If your current strategy isn’t effective or stops being effective, then it’s time to try new techniques.
********************
Jason Mikula works as a freelance search engine marketing and social media marketing consultant. Jason has experience working with pay per click, search engine optimization, and email and web marketing.