With such a large number of analytical tools for social media, it is understandable that you may feel overwhelmed with all of the data that is available. However, with some simple steps, you’ll be analysing the success of your social media campaigns in no time:
There are so many statistics, which ones are relevant to me?
Firstly, take a step back and think about what you want your social media campaigns to achieve. Do you want to gain more brand awareness, drive more website traffic, or would you like it to provide better customer service? Whatever its role, pick out the statistics which help show if you have been successful or not in working towards your aim. For example, if you’re looking at driving web traffic, create trackable links (you could use bitly) and see how many people have clicked on them. You could also look at Google Analytics, to see how much traffic has come to your website from social media.
Should I be measuring ‘Likes’ and followers?
Although it is great to see your follower numbers increase, what does this figure really show? A common way to increase followers is to run a competition. Although you get a sudden increase in fans, you may find that not all of these people are interested in your company, but just want to win a prize. These followers may also not be your target market and so although many companies still measure their social media success against this figure, it shouldn’t be your key focus.
What are the key statistics that I should be monitoring?
This depends on what you want to achieve. However, a good area to measure success is on customer interactions, so see how engaged your communities are. This can be seen through how many customers add a comment to one of your posts, ‘like’ or favourite a post, retweet or share a post and click on your post links. On Facebook, you also have a figure which shows how many people are ‘talking about this’ which is a good engagement indicator.
Which social media analytics tools should I use?
There are a number of free and paid for tools available, each providing different statistics, however, to get you started, here are a few free tools to give you the basic data that you may need: Facebook Insights, Twitter Counter, TweetStats, Pinpuff, Bitly, Klout.
Do you have any other tools that you have enjoyed using? Leave us a comment below to let us know your favourites!
Images courtesy of Facebook Insights
